July 16 -- The first place we stopped upon arrival at Dulles on the 16th was the relatively new "annex" to the Smithsonian's Air and Space Museum, which is right next to Dulles itself. This museum is called the Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center, because said person is the donor of $66 million towards the museum's construction.

After the museum we headed in towards the city to check into our hotel. We also drove to Silver Spring to see my grandpa Barney's old house (which Mom still owns), and we ate at the Woodside Deli, which was a regular dinner spot on our family visits to Barney's place. They serve some of the best milkshakes I've ever had.

We then drove around to see a bit of Rock Spring Park, which is a large and surprisingly "wild" park just outside of Washington, and then made our way down to the Mall area where we stopped at the Jefferson Memorial shortly before sunset, and as a thunderstorm was moving in.

This sculpture stands at the entrance of the Udvar-Hazy Center. You can see the museum itself in the background, which is sort of a bold building. It basically looks like an airport.

This is an example of the Bell 47B, the first commercially-produced helicopter model. If I remember the plaque correctly, this particular 47B is the oldest flight-worthy helicopter in the world. It set the world record for a continuous hover at nearly 51 hours. Also, it's adorable.

One of several gyroplanes and gyrocopters on display. This is an autogyro / gyroplane. The propeller on top of an autogyro is not motorized. It spins automatically when air rushes past the aircraft due to forward motion. So like a plane, it generates enough lift to fly only when moving fast; but, it does so without having wings. The front-mounted propeller is the only motorized part.

One of the first "true" flying wing aircraft. (I thought the plaque said it was the first, but the muesum's website says it was the first "to be produced in the US".)

Fastest airplane in the world, the SR-71. One problem with a lot of the cool aircraft here was that they're too big to take nice pictures of unless you are really far away.

Oh, by the way, one of the pieces on display at the museum is A SPACE SHUTTLE. Granted, this is the Enterprise, which was the first shuttle built, was purely for gliding tests and is not space-worthy, but still. Dude. SPACE SHUTTLE. As with the big planes, it was a little hard to get a nice picture. I have a few of its rear engines that I like, but this is a decent view of nearly the whole thing.

In a collection of "space" memorabilia was this awesome space helmet with radar goggles. They also had a tin donut space station with little people inside it, but my photo of it was sorta blurry.

Here we are many hours later at the Jefferson Memorial. This is a view of the front from ground level. Note that the sky was still blue. The memorial is open on four sides, aside from the pillars, and the front faces across the Tidal Basin directly towards the Washington Monument.

A pretty good statue inside.

From the haze off to the right, and along the top of the steps, you can get some idea of how hard it started to rain. Because of the open nature of the memorial, and the strong wind, there were only a few places to stand without getting wet.

A view out a different direction. Again, note how much haze there is in the path of the floodlights. There was so much wind that if you looked up at the statue, you could see rain swirling around Jefferson's head, even high up in the middle of the structure.

With the low clouds and city lights, the sky turned red. This is a shot across the Basin towards the city.

MOVIE

My camera has a movie mode, so I took a couple movies of the storm as well. They are in Quicktime MOV format straight out of the camera. I don't seem to have any software which can edit MOV files, so there's a little dead time in this first one. But after a few seconds there are a few nice flashes. If you freeze frame you can see a reflection of a lightning bolt in the marble floor to the left.

MOVIE

Another movie -- standing closer to the edge, so there are fewer pillars in-frame, you get a great view of a lightning bolt coming down beside the Washington Monument.

July 17 -- The next day we started off with the Smithsonian's new Museum of the American Indian. It'd been open for less than two years, and since opening had been the most-attended Smithsonian museum aside from Air and Space, which beats out all the others by a huge margin. We took a nice tour of the museum led by a representative of the Lummi Nation, and had lunch in their all-indian-cuisine food court. I ate a buffalo burger. It tasted a lot like a beef burger. (Okay, the indians probably didn't eat their buffalo meat in burger form, but most of the dishes there were pretty authentic.)

After a couple more hours we took the Metro to the harbor area and ate dinner at a seafood place on the shore. Although I've eaten crab cakes at several restaurants in the past, I was here asked for my first time whether I wanted my cakes broiled or friend. At the server's suggestion, I got one of each, and found that I prefer them broiled. After eating we started walking back to the Mall to see some more memorials.

The exterior of the of Indian Museum looks sort of like a pueblo or cliff-dwelling.

As we walked back to the Mall after dinner, we passed a busy fish market. Many of the tables had huge piles of live crabs.

We were now on the opposite side of the Tidal Basin as we'd been the night before, so we had a nice long view of the Jefferson Memorial.

There were ducks here.

None of us had seen the World War II Memorial yet, so we headed down to it. The sun was already starting to set, and the sky looked nice. Since the human eye's response to light intensity is logarithmic, and cameras are linear, it is difficult to reproduce in a photo what things look like to the eye in situations with a lot of contrast. The sky looked about like it does in this picture, but the foreground and such should really appear lighter, as it does in some later pictures. I lightened the ground and memorial up a little with TheGIMP, but it doesn't look quite right to me.

A closer view of the memorial. It's a large fountain surrounded by pillars representing the US states and territories that sent soldiers to fight on both fronts. Here, somebody has left flowers in offering / remembrance in the California pillar.

Although it was sunset, it was still quite hot and humid. Lots of people were milling about the edges of the fountain. The memorial is located on the Mall about halfway between the Washington Monument and Lincoln Memorial. The Reflecting Pool that lies in front of Lincoln was right behind me as I took this shot.

Abother offering, this one with a photo and by the interior base of the Pennsylvania pillar.

There were ducks here.

The memorial is beautifully lit. Both of the large jets have sets of lights underneath, and each of the little streams "glows" with a fiber-optic effect because they are arced gently.

This was probably my favorite of the places we visited in Washington, although the Jefferson Memorial is also quite beautiful.

There was an ugly temporary fence between the WWII Memorial and the Reflecting Pool, so I didn't take any long shots from the WWII showing both it and the Pool/Lincoln. I did take a few over the fence, though.

There were ducks there, too.

Aside from the heat, it really was a lovely evening. Great for photography.

By this point we were totally beat, as we'd been on our feet all day. We went back to the Metro to return to our hotel. When we used to visit Barney we would often ride the Metro from Silver Spring into the city, but in my later high school trips to Washington I never used the subway. (We just took a bus right to the Mall, and stayed in that area.) I've always liked the style of the Metro stations though, with their high, arched ceilings and brown hexagonal floor tiles. They're very different than most of the other subway systems I've used.

July 18 -- The next day we started with the Holocaust Museum, which Annie-Laurie had been to before, but Dad and I hadn't. Even by 10 AM, as we waited for the museum to open and let us in, the heat was nearly unbearable. I only took two pictures in that museum, and they're not very good ones, so I'll skip right over that. (I found out later that they don't allow photography anyway. Oh well. I have forbidden pictures of the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, too.) It was definitely worth seeing, though. My favorite part came right at the end where they have a video playing with a dozen or so concentration camp survivors telling stories.

We ended up staying at the Holocaust Museum longer than we intended, and still needed to get to the National Zoo. So, rather than stopping for a real lunch we grabbed hot dogs from a street vendor on our way to the subway. Yay! I love hot dog cart hot dogs. After the zoo we went back to the Mall to hit some more memorials. They're prettiest around sunset, and unlike museums they don't close, so we kept saving them for evening.

I was really amused by this sight at the zoo. All I could think was, "Mmmm. Delicious."

I'm not sure if this giraffe was bashful, or if he was actually penned up in there. There was another giraffe outside, so they definitely weren't all being kept inside at the time.

It's no Gouldian Finch, but this was probably the prettiest bird they had at the zoo. It's called a green magpie, but clearly sometimes they are blue instead.

I like timber wolves, but these Mexican wolves were pretty cool, too. They look really mangy but still beautiful.

Maureen here was the only pinniped out in the heat. She seemed pretty comfortable.

Back at the Mall, I took this camera-on-the-ground shot of the Vietnam War Memorial after a young woman in front of us did the same thing. I thought it was a good idea.

The stones with the engraved names are very shiney.

I find the little offerings that people leave in memory of loved ones fascinating.

One of the two segments of the wall points straight east towards the Washington Monument.

As we left the Vietnam Memorial and headed towards the Korean, I spotted a group playing baseball. In the background you can see the dome of the Smithsonian Natural History Museum, the Capitol, and the Washington Monument. The composition just struck me as really "American" so I took a couple shots of it.

Between the Vietnam and Korean war memorials is the Lincoln end of the Reflecting Pool. From here you can see the Washington Monument and the Capitol in the back, and the fountains of the WWII Memorial popping up just past the end of the pool.

There were ducks here.

This was the best of three attempts at this shot, although I wish my earlier tries with more light had turned out better. I placed my camera right on the ground and tilted it up to get a view of the steps and people with the statue of Lincoln at the top. Even with the camera on the ground, it was hard to get it steady for the low light since I needed to tilt it.

July 19 -- The next day we left Washington with an ultimate destination of Hagerstown, MD, where my paternal grandfather -- my last grandparent -- lives. First we drove around a few places in Maryland, though, including a nice little park where they've kept up maintenance on a part of the old C&O Canal. There is an area of rapids in the Potomac here called Great Falls, and the canal -- since there is a rapid change in elevation here -- has a series of locks. Until their boat deteriorated too much, you could take rides through the locks here, pulled along by mules just like in the old days.

I found this sign sort of amusing. The thumbnail links to a full-size picture, instead of the reduced pictures from all the other thumbnails, so you can read the text. I guess I often find warning signs amusing, especially when they depict people meeting grisly ends.

A view of the Great Falls rapids.

Here I am, standing in front of the Woodside Deli in Silver Spring.

None of my Korean War Memorial pictures were all that great, but I liked a couple of Dad's. It's an interesting thing -- statues of soldiers wearing ponchos, trudging up a set of terraces that give the impression of rice paddies.

In the various branches of the Potomac near Great Falls, we spotted a pair of great blue herons. They were pretty far away, so they're pretty small in my pictures. Dad's camera was up to the task, though.

Three generations of Stonebraker men.