Monday

After a good old cup-o-tea, we packed our bag for the day and headed out on the metro to the Smithsonian National Air & Space Museum.

The museum is enormous and houses some of the most iconic planes and space vehicles in the world.

We spent about 3 hours looking at all the exhibits, but you could easily spend twice that time if you read every panel of information.

Some of the highlights for me were seeing the actual Apollo 11 capsule that travelled to the moon and back.

Amelia Earhart’s Lockheed Vega in which she became the first woman to solo fly across the Atlantic.

SpaceShipOne, designed and built by Burt Rutan, which in 2004 became the first manned private space vehicle (Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic fleet uses the subsequent SpaceShipTwo craft).

After all the wandering around we left the museum and had an ice cream on the steps outside. When the wind dropped it was really nice and warm.

We wandered up to the Mall to the Capitol building and sat down on the lawn in front of it. Normally there would be a lovely view up the Mall to the Washington Monument, but the view up the Mall is a bit ruined at the moment as they’re in the process of installing a new irrigation system, so there are diggers and cranes everywhere. Nevermind.

After chilling out on the lawn planning our next sights, we walked around to the visitor centre and went into the Capitol building. We didn’t actually go on a full tour because when we checked last month, all the Easter tour dates were booked (by school groups it would seem! Laura: My favourite school group had khaki t-shirts with the slogan “I believe I can fly” written on them…)  Anyway, the bit we did see was very grand.

We walked over to the Library of Congress and looked around. The reading room is spectacular (but no photography allowed - boo)

We were both pretty hungry by this point so we took the metro to Chinatown and hunted down a place called Matchbox that had been recommended to us by Rory (the Segway tour guide – keep up!).  Even though it should have been easy to find, it took us 10 minutes of wandering around the block between 7^th and H streets before we’d almost given up, when we finally spotted it and realised it was a place we’d seen yesterday that we thought looked (and smelled) nice. Cue lots of “Ah! It’s this place!” remarks.  Incidentally, it would be a little while later before I realised that my CityMaps2Go iPhone app actually has a search feature and a detailed map that would have helped us find it! Laura already knew this but didn’t tell me! Doh!

Matchbox was really nice and our waitress was very friendly. We drank cocktails and then ordered a 50/50 pizza split between the Q special which had chicken, mushroom and roasted peppers and meat/pepperoni. The spinach, walnut and feta salad was lovely. 

Laura almost got drunk on the bacon dressing. I got a bit tipsy on beer. Laura got a bit tipsy (for real) on the strongest berry vodka and lemonade ever made! “You’re Brits, I thought you could handle it” said the waitress.

(Laura: That dressing may not look that appetising but it was amazing, I've never tasted anything like it. I was contemplating asking for a pint of it to go!)

We then made the tough decision not to just stay there and drink and instead headed a few blocks south to the National Archives and queued up to the see the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution and the Magna Carta. It was cool to see the Declaration and the Constitution but they’re very faded. The Magna Carta on the other hand, despite being 500 years older, was much better preserved. (This was a very VERY sneaky photo as you really got told off it you tried to take a picture. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if the FBI hunted me down for even just posting this shot of the queue....)

An eagle on the door of the National Archives

We then looked around the rest of the archives before it closed at 7pm and we were kicked out. We headed home and stopped off at the Harris Teeter grocery store just around the corner from our apartment. There were loads of crazy foods on sale (a gallon of lemonade blend tea?!) but we just got normal fruit, soda (hehe) and beer.

Back at the apartment we planned on staying up, watching a bit of TV and eating some ice cream, but by 9.30 we were both asleep. Sightseeing is hard work.