4.08.2012 – 4.08.2012  37 °C

Early start today for our first day in DC! One thing we had organised yesterday evening was for us to go around the mall and the monuments on a Segway so we had a few hours to kill before we hit the roads.

We decided to spend our time down at the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum! What a place! It must have one of the largest and most complete collections of flight history in the world. We were fortunate in that we arrived and were immediately able to join one of the free tours of the museum. We started upstairs where the history of flight began with Orville and Wilbur Wright’s first flight in Kitty Hawk, North Carolina. One of the Wright brother’s original planes is on display here in the Smithsonian- setup just as the brothers would have had it setup back in the early 20^th C.

From the Wright brothers we saw one of the first commercial prop planes, one of Amelia Earheart’s planes, Chuck Jager’s record breaking Speed of Sound plane, supersonic jets… If you are an aviation buff than this place is a must!

The aerospace section was the area that really caught my attention. Mercury and Saturn rockets adorn a whole wing and of course no aerospace American museum would be complete without the Apollo 11 capsule and landing module.. My gosh, the space inside those modules was super limited on board those early age rockets! No trip to the Air and Space museum without the obligatory stop into McDs for lunch.. Yep the American bench mark of fast food can even be found in space!

We had to dash from the Air and Space museum and head straight up to Foggy Bottom (yep no typo here) to get on our Segways! We all gave the Segway-ing a go, sadly, M had to miss the tour after falling heavily off the beast during our practice time.. A slight knee and wrist injury kept her behind which meant she missed out on our tour of the sites… 🙁

D&I had to take off with the group and we headed straight to the White House. It is a pretty impressive building.. What more can I say? Its white, its big, secret service are very prevalent, he wasn’t home (apparently you can only tell if the President is home, if you can see a guard standing outside the west wing), there are really lovely gardens around it and oodles of tourists all taking their photos! White House= Check!

Next stop saw us zoom down Pennsylvania Ave from the White House to the Capital building! Congress= Check! From the seat of government we made a more leisurely zoom thru the National Mall (which is undergoing heavy construction so isn’t super pretty to look at!) via the Smithsonian (which by the way is made up of 19 different museums..) and down to the Washington Monument= Check!

The Monument is pretty impressive, it’s this huge needle (think Egyptian obelisk) made of marble dedicated to Washington…. And they say that the Masonic Lodges’ didn’t have a big impact on Washington…. Mmm.

The mall itself is a pretty impressive park area. At the eastern edge is the Capital building and the western edge is the Lincoln Memorial, half way down is the Washington Monument, and bisecting the mall (at the point of the Washington Monument) is the White House to the North and the Jefferson Memorial to the South… Does anyone else see a Christian representation in this layout?

Our last few stops were at the WWII memorial and the Lincoln Memorial. The Lincoln Memorial is extremely impressive! You can see the statue of Lincoln from quite a distance, and the view from the top step of the memorial is the classic view of the mall crowned by the Capital. Sadly, the view was marred for us by the lack of water in the reflection pool. Both D&I were looking for the classic Forest Gump/ Vietnam War protest/ Martin Luther King photo of the reflection pool and the memorial.. No water and a construction zone made this impossible. I guess you can’t always get exactly the photo you are looking for!

The marble monolith that is the Lincoln Memorial was worth the stop (and the hike up the stairs) for both D&I for no other reason than to get out of the heat! It is HOT today and driving around for a couple of hours on a Segway hasn’t improved my sun burn or body temp!!

I guess the million dollar question most of you are asking is- would I Segway again? Absolutely, is the answer. Segway-ing is easy and it is pretty fun! I would think that nearly anyone who has relatively good balance and can stand up for long periods would be able to Segway.. It only took me a couple of turns around the parking lot to work out how to get it to go forward and back. The big drawback today to Segway-ing was the heat.. Standing in the sun for hours is tough work when the temp is high 30s!

We ended our day today at the local Thai restaurant where I had the most fabulous Yellow Curry ever! Dinner was so good that we will probably come back here again before we leave DC.. Really good curry.

Song of the Day– Tom Petty, Free Falling