Weather: rain at first, mostly overcast but brief sun early evening
I was up at 9.30, and again Reba dropped me off at the station after breakfast. The poor weather suggested that this would be a good day to spend in a museum, and I headed for the Museum of Air and Space, a prominent feature of the south side of the Mall near the ``Castle'', an 1840s building in the Romanesque style which formed the first of the buildings of the Smithsonian Institution.
The entrance hall of the Air & Space museum contains its most famous exhibits. First is the machine which started it all, the Wright brothers' 1903 Flyer, while other notable aircraft include Lindbergh's Spirit of St. Louis, which made the first solo transatlantic crossing, the Bell X-1 in which Chuck Yeager broke the sound barrier in 1947 and the hypersonic X-15, a rocket-powered aeroplane which first flew in 1959, reaching record altitudes and speeds.
The hall also includes various spacecraft, although in many cases these are replicas owing to the considerable difficulties in recovering the originals. Two originals are the command module of the historic Apollo 11, in which the first astronauts to walk on the moon returned, and Friendship 7, in which John Glenn became the first American to orbit the earth. Replicas ranged from the overgrown football of Sputnik 1 to a variety of interplanetary probes, and also some of Robert Goddard's experimental rockets from the 1920s. Some more recent acquisitions were a pair of ICBMs, one from the USA and one from the Soviet Union, eliminated under bilateral treaty in 1987, and the gondola of the Breitling Orbiter 3 balloon, which in 1999 became the first balloon to make a non-stop round-the-world trip. Nearby was Voyager, the first heavier-than-air aircraft to achieve the same feat, in nine days during 1986. A small panel by the door allowed one to touch a small fragment of moon rock, which without the benefit of a series of geological tests seemed to me very much like a terrestrial rock.
Some of the other galleries were temporarily closed for refurbishment, but even so there was plenty to keep me occupied, with commercial and military aircraft from throughout the history of flight, and exhibitions relating to space travel in both fact and fiction. With a break for lunch in the museum's cafeteria, I spent the entire day there until I was rather officiously moved first downstairs and then outside in preparation for the museum's closure at 5.30.
By this time, the sun had appeared, and so having a little time to spare I decided to take a walk up to Capitol Hill and take a few photographs of the exterior of this magnificent building as lit by the setting sun. I then took the metro from nearby Union Station to Dupont Circle, where I was due to meet Reba and Susan, this area of the city being much better for shops and restaurants than the vicinity of the Mall, which is dominated by federal buildings.
I found Reba and Susan waiting for me at the station, and we headed out in search of a restaurant, settling for an Italian establishment a couple of streets away. We started the meal with aperitifs selected from the restaurant's extensive list of martinis, and followed this with some excellent pasta dishes. Afterwards we browsed in some of the nearby souvenir and bookshops for a while before heading to a Starbucks coffee shop for drinks. Not being a coffee drinker I was unable to choose anything from the vast range of coffees on offer, but I settled for a hot chocolate. We sat in large and comfortable armchairs by the window (there was no Friends-style sofa) chatting until about 22.30.
Susan had left her car outside Reba's apartment building and so came back with us, coming inside for a while longer to look through some photographs and to offer us some excellent chocolate fudge brownies. I was particularly interested in Reba's photographs of Orkney she had taken on a recent trip there for a wedding, having visited Orkney myself a couple of years previously.
Susan left soon after midnight, and Reba and I stayed up for a while longer talking and watching an episode of Doctor Who on television before retiring a little before 2.00.