Washington airport

Damn flight is delayed 40 mins so far. Curse you Ronald Reagan Airport.
Additional: all the liquid hand soap in D.C.smells like cherry.

Washington D.C.

Washington DC Day 1 21^st December

A super early start of 5am today to ensure that we made our 7am train from Penn Station. We arrived at our beautiful hotel, the Washington Plaza at around 10am and checked in. We were given a suite with two bathrooms, a bed as big as our bedroom at home and a lounge. They also gave us champagne and chocolate dipped strawberries as I had said it was our honeymoon when booking. It was a bit nuts, but at least it meant that we could look forward to three nights of proper sleep.

We decided to go exploring and after some directions we began walking towards the 'mall' – a very long stretch of parkland, monuments and museums. We first came upon the White House from the rear of the building where the giant lantern hangs above the entrance. It's a beautiful place and we were lucky to get perfect weather. There were a couple of small protests and a local Fox news person asked us for our assessment of Obama's year. We said he'd done as well as he could and he seemed mildly surprised. We walked the whole way around to the front of the house and took some photos. You're actually really quite far away from the front of the building in comparison to the rear, but it's still very surreal seeing the actual White House in the flesh. Both of us were almost waiting to see it explode really, as that's how it's often pictured on screen. We continued our walk and spied the Washington monument (it's hard to miss) and continued to the left towards the reflecting pool and the Lincoln memorial. It's a bit of a hike but we did make it to the Lincoln memorial and wow, it's spectacular. The statue is huge and every bit as imposing as you imagine, and to either side carved into the walls are two of his famous speeches, which lend a bitter irony to the city as he was a champion of peace and diplomacy. We stopped at a little refreshment stand where we met some of the very bold bird life and then we decided to hire bikes to get around during our time in the city.

From the memorial we went back towards the Washington monument and over to the strip of Smithsonian's. During the walk we saw the president's helicopter fly over, though we weren't in a position to take a photo. The mall is a simply huge boulevard with ten museums/galleries lining either side and ending with the superb Capitol building. We visited the Smithsonian castle which is also the information centre, learned that all of the galleries and museums are free and decided to try and see a couple of things that afternoon. Since we missed out on MoMA in NY we went to the Hirshhorn Museum which is dedicated to modern and contemporary art. It's a lovely museum, and we saw some original Warhol prints and paintings, as well as a number of installations on the theme of 'destruction' which were quite interesting. It didn't take us that long to see everything so we then made our way over to the Natural History Museum to see the Butterly house and Insect Exhibit at the end of the day. The Butterfly house was just brilliant – the museum hatches their butterflies every day and has a temperature controlled, purpose built garden inside for them. This is connected to the insect exhibit where tarantulas, beetles, spiders, centipedes, grasshoppers and so on are kept. It was a fun and engaging end to our day of sightseeing.

We decided to check out the pub just down from our hotel for tea, where Andrew had a bison burger and I had some lovely salmon. Unlike NY where everything is open until quite late, DC is really very, very quiet, with most stores and even cafes being shut by 7pm. After our dinner we went back to our luxurious hotel and promptly passed out from exhaustion.

Washingon day 2

Today was all about museums. We began with the American History Museum, which is dedicated to the preservation of American culture. It was brilliant. We saw Dorothy's ruby slippers, Kermit the frog, Kelly Slater's surfboard and (possibly one of the most exciting things) Pretty Hate Machine on tape as part of the audio exhibit – it could have been any tape in the world, and it was that one. This museum was excellent generally, though the war section had a few glaring omissions, such as no reference at all to the internment of Japanese and German citizens during the war, and some of the language choices were quite interesting, such as the write up about the making of the American flag being undertaken by a number of women and an 'indentured black servant' who worked for the family. It was a brilliant place to visit and we were there for around four and a half hours.

We then headed back to the Natural History museum to explore the rest of it. So many dinosaurs! We spent the rest of the day weaving through thousands of exhibits on ocean life, mammals, dinosaurs, geology and so on. One of our favourites was the skeleton of the Mastodon, a huge mammoth like creature that also had teeth. This also took a number of hours and we were there until closing, though we did see everything. The city was even quieter than the night before as everything must shut at 5.30pm on a Saturday, so we went to the Hard Rock Cafe for very cheap cocktails and huge servings of food, before finding a little Christmas market which we had a quick look through and then we head back to our hotel. Another very busy day.

Day 3 – National Air and Space Museum!

Breakfast was at a delightful crepe kitchen that we found on our way to the museums, and they were delicious! I had Nutella and strawberries and Andrew had egg and ham. Delicious! Then we made our way to the National Air and Space Museum.

The title really says it all – this place was incredible! We walked into the museum and were greeted by the Apollo module, Chuck Jager's jet plane, the Spirit of St Louis and a piece of the moon all in the first section! We decided to go on the tour, which went for three hours, and covered some great details about the early days of flight, changes in aviation over time, famous pilots and astronauts, technological developments and, of course, space exploration. After the tour we had some lunch then went and did the full circuit of the museum on our own. It took all day but we left with a great sense of wonder at how far we have come in just 66 years from the first flight to landing on the moon (a bit of which we actually touched!). We took soooo many photos, so they will really show what we saw in detail.

The museums were now closed and so was pretty much everything else, so we decided to grab some cheap Mexican food for dinner and then we ended up back at our hotel by about 7pm. We finished off season 10 of Stargate and watched The Ark of Truth and went to bed.

Day 4 Morning

We only really had time to get some breakfast at a lovely little bakery and then head to the airport, ready to meet Kathy in Buffalo to begin our Christmas week in Canada. We are now waiting in the Ronald Reagan airport eating Five Guys burgers and they are amazing.