Day Well Spent

The freeway that never sleeps howls below the hotel, matched only by the air-conditioner that won't let you sleep - but we slept anyway, dead tired and afraid of not getting an early start in the morning. Then it turned out that getting to downtown Washington is utterly painless: the hotel takes you to the Metro, the Metro takes you to the Mall, the stop is labelled Smithsonian, and there you are.
Not being entirely too bright, I didn't take a picture of the Smithsonian Castle, but google it, and triple the effect of whatever photo you might find, as the reality of it is quite overwhelming. After viewing the displays there, we went down the street to the National Air and Space Museum, where we assumed that between 1030 and 1600 we could see everything that would interest us. Wrong. It all interested us; the entire museum is all highlights, and they pushed us to the curb at 1700 with everyone else with at least one gallery missed and several rushed through. Hours later, I'm still trying to sort out how I feel about all.
All my life I have seen pictures of the Wright Brothers' Flyer - now I have seen the Flyer itself, the actual machine that started the 20th century with a bang that is not yet done resounding.
There is the Spirit of St. Louis, the Apollo 11 Command Module, Chuck Yeager's sound barrier- breaking Glamorous Glennis, and Friendship 7, a piece of moon rock you can touch and Space Ship One, and that's just in the entrance hall. There are early rockets and late missiles, a V-1 buzz bomb and a V-2 assembled from leftover parts of captured examples and not uncoincidentally reminiscent of an Oldsmobile hood ornament - if only a little bit bigger than the whole car. There is the backup Skylab that you can walk through, and a backup LEM that could have gone to the moon, but didn't, and a moon suit that did, and came back with grey dust from the surface that is still ground into the fabric - there is more in that building than I can describe, more than I could see, more than I could put into this entry and still expect anyone to read it. These things have held me fascinated since I was a child; it is not often that you get to stand so forcefully in front of your youth.