Epic East Coast - Day 15

We went out to the second location of the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum, which is a hangar complex located at Dulles airport.  The location allows them to easily keep all the big planes there, as they can land at Dulles and move into the museum.  It also has enough open space to display the majority of the planes the museum has.  It was, honestly, much more interesting than the museum in downtown DC.

It was also much more difficult to get to, since it was at the airport and not downtown.  We walked to a metro station that was a bit farther away, but did not require us to change lines immediately and rode the 40 minutes or so to the end of the line.  We then switched to a bus for the rest of the trip to the airport.  That also took around 40 minutes, but we had to wait 20 minutes for the bus to arrive, so that it was over two hours before we arrived at the museum.  Inside, we took a quick tour around the fighter jets, walked by the SR-71 and then headed to the McDonald's for lunch.

We were then able to take a closer look at all of the planes and explore the warplane area before heading into the commercial plane area, where the big draw was an Air France Concorde.  The final section was devoted to space and missiles and contained the space shuttle Discovery.  I did not realize how big the shuttles were, nor that the white part of the shuttles was a flexible fabric-like covering, not metal.  The rest of the shuttle is covered in small heat resistant tiles (22,000+), each with a unique serial number on it.

After we explored the main level of the hangar, we went up on a series of platforms that allowed us to view the airplanes from above, or at eye level for the planes that were hung from the ceiling.  From the platform you could get a great view of the cockpit of the Enola Gay.  We got back on the bus, waited about 15 minutes for it to leave and got back on the metro.

We got off a little bit early so that we could go to Arlington Cemetery and see the Marine Memorial, which is a statue of the Marines raising the flag at Iwo Jima.  It was much larger than I expected and a very impressive statue.  After that, we walked through the cemetery to JFK's grave before finding a different metro station for the trip home.  It was 7:30pm when we finally got back to the condo, so I quickly made the kids some supper and then got them into bed.