Monday December 13th. – National Air and Space Museum, Washington, USA

The Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum is very near Dulles Airport, so it’s the perfect venue to spend the day until check-in time if you’re neurotic travellers, as we are.  And what a place it is.  An immense white curved hangar – the guide said the size of the hangars that were built for the airships – with myriads of planes of all shapes and eras hanging at wild angles from the roof.  You feel as if you are in some frenetic airshow with planes looping the loop, diving and spinning all around you.  The museum seemed mainly to be staffed by ‘seniors’, mostly war veterans, who oozed excitement and knowledge about every exhibit. 



US Enterprise



The star turns were a sinister, immense black spy plane too huge to take in all at one glance; the space shuttle Enterprise – apparently it ‘flies like a brick’; the space capsules from the moon landings and from first space flight – two guys spent fourteen days lying on their backs in a space no larger than baby’s cot – no really – and as they emerged, one joked ‘Well, I guess we’re engaged now’.  Close friendship in the literal sense. 

Then there was Concorde, slim and elegant; ephemeral looking First World War planes made mainly of wood, paper and string; and a peculiar contraption in which a man pedalled across the English Channel.  Folk do strange things, to be sure. 

The Enola Gay

One exhibit was hard to get your head around – a very large shining silver plane, gleaming from wing tip to tail plane, towered over all the others near it.  There was a gangway above from which you could peer right into the cockpit.  This was the Enola Gay, the plane which dropped the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima.  How did I feel looking at this?  I still cannot say.  Numb I think.

We left the museum in the teeth of a bitingly cold wind, said fond good bye’s to Mary Carolyn, checked in under the elegance of Dulles Airport’s soaring roof at and flew off into the night.  Night flying ‘across the pond’ makes you lose all track of time, and you arrive feeling as if your brains have been sucked out through your ears.  Ah well, that’s travel for you, and as we land in a frozen Glasgow, trees etched white with frost, we know that that is the end of another chapter of granny’s trekking adventures.  But February will be off to New Zealand and Australia, and in between there’s Christmas!