06.06 - Day 143 - Harpers Ferry to Yorkshire
Thursday 6th June - Harpers Ferry, West Virginia - Yorkshire, Virginia (Day 143)
Following the usual routine of breakfast and school work in our Quality Hotel we pack up and check out, heading an hour south to the west of Washington DC. After enjoying the Air & Space museum in DC, we’re seeking out its sister museum - the Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center (a forgettable mouthful) - which sits inside a giant hangar just near Washington Dulles Airport. We collected a rotisserie chicken en route and had a small picnic outside the museum in the warm sunshine.
This is yet another Smithsonian Museum, though named after the businessman who donated $65m to help build it (though we note Jeff Bezos’ name sits at the top of the Donor list - top spot for $200m - will it be renamed after him now?) and given the size of the car park, it can get extremely busy.
We first go up the Observation Tower - watching planes take off from the next door airport with the live radio communication between planes and air traffic control playing out into the room. In the main T-shaped hanger there are an almost overwhelming 230 aircrafts from helicopters to early hot air balloon baskets to military aircrafts to the Discovery Space Shuttle - the later veteran of 39 space flights.
It is of course massive. It’s also our first experience of a Working-From-Home volunteer; a large TV and webcam alongside the Discovery allows Sienna to ask why some of the shuttle is black and some white.
The kids are very happy with the ‘discovery pop up centres’, little tables manned, each on a different topic, brought to life by enthusiastic workers - from Black Holes to Meteorites to Space Food to build-your-own-craft to sit in the vertical wind tunnel.
We were all impressed and disheartened by one of the centrepieces, the Lockheed SR71 Blackbird, a giant stealthy plane which did the same West coast to East coast journey which took us 5 weeks, in 64 minutes at over 2,000 miles an hour.
We bagged our second Concorde after New York, still surprised at how small the windows were.
Lost (for now) on Sienna and Seb was Enola Gay, the atomic bomb dropping plane - Kate and I have now seen the plane that dropped the bomb and also the spot it exploded in Hiroshima. We also watched a 25 minute showing in the Imax on what it’ll take to get to Mars.
Overall, an amazing array and easy to spend several hours there.
It’s a 20 minute drive onwards to our La Quinta Hotel in Yorkshire, a clean and crisp affair where we sup on a simple soup, and then because it’s still in the high 20’s at 7pm, Sienna and Seb get in the small outdoor pool whilst Kate and I have a wine and beer poolside.