Days 53 & 54 - Visiting the Air and Space Museum and a very relaxing day by the river!

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So once again we're going to post a combined blog for yesterday and today, mainly because yesterday was quite exhausting and we pretty much crashed out in our room once we got back. It probably worked out for the best really, otherwise today's blog on it's own would be pretty uneventful! Anyway, we'll catch you up on what we did yesterday first.

We woke up at about 9:00am so that we could head downstairs for some breakfast which we were told finished at 10:00am. We ended up getting down there by about 9:30am and proceeded over to the area where the bread/toaster/jam is located, noticing that there was only about 3 slices of bread left. Emma asked the man at reception if they had anymore, which he kindly went to fetch. Minutes later (after we had started to cook our toast), what we imagine to be the manager/boss showed up and starting moaning to the clerk that he should not have put anything more out and that breakfast finishes at 9:30am! Knowing the correct time in the first place would have been helpful to us, that way we would have woken up earlier and saved the hassle.

Once we had finished eating we came back to the room to get washed and dressed. Craig finished first so took the netbook downstairs to check on the internet for something to do during the day (we didn't fancy going to a proper tourist area at the weekend), something like a shopping mall or plaza was the idea. Once Emma was ready, she met Craig downstairs and went over the plans for the day. Essentially we settled on a couple of options that were local, checking on google maps to work out how to get there. We eventually set off at about 11:30am, heading east towards the shopping centre we had settled on. Our trip took us past the White House, outside of which were hundreds of people marching/protesting for Barrack Obama to liberate their nation (Iranian or Saudi Arabian we think) from the dictactors in charge (we think this was bought on by the death of Gadaffi). Also, inside the gates of the White House we spotted what appeared to be a jet-black squirrel - never seen one that colour before!

After about 30 minutes of walking/looking around, we found the place we were looking for, so went inside to have a look around. The reviews on the internet said it had the best food court around, and since it was dinner time, we were quite looking forward to sampling the delights that were on offer. In reality, however, we walked around what can only be described as a 3-level mall that had about 3 shops that were actually open and 2 eateries.. NONE of which were open! Pfft. Some food court, eh?! We swiftly made an exit, knowing that we were definitely not going to be killing any time in there, and made our way further down the street, following signs for 'The National Mall' - we thought this might be another shopping centre, turns out we were wrong, lol.

After walking for about 15-20 minutes, we realised that 'The National Mall' is not so much a collection of shops and eateries, but instead the collective names for the museums and important government buildings that are all grouped together south-east of the White House. We contemplated simply grabbing a snack from a street vendor again, but decided against it when we spotted 'The Old Post Office' shopping plaza just across the road from us, so walked in that direction - hoping they had a better food court! We went through the main entrance, where we passed through an aiport-style security check (really, America.. to get into a shopping centre?!), with the first thing in front of us when actually inside being the elusive food court we were dying to find. We scanned eateries briefly to check their menus and prices, deciding to order from a fairly generic place that had everything from burgers and fries to chinese entrees and chicken. We both had chicken nuggets with fries and a drink and took them to the table area to eat (Emma very much missing vinegar, they don't seem to offer it with anything at all here!), quickly polishing off our meals with relative ease - it was already almost 2:00pm so we were pretty hungry!

We didn't really have a plan for the rest of the day, initially opting to have a fairly relaxed weekend ready for the day at the zoo planned for Monday. However, after mulling things over for a while we had the idea to check out one of the Smithsonian Institution's most popular offerings - The Air and Space Museum. We checked the trusty map and made ourselves familiar with where we needed to walk (once again, only a few blocks/streets away), so off we went.

We reached the museum by about 2:00pm - walking past the smallest McDonalds we'd ever seen, literally just a trailer - and went inside. Once again admission was free thanks to the Smithsonian Institution. We were immediately greeted with sights of rockets, space capsules, aeroplanes and much more. As is common with our 'explanations' of museums, we won't go into too much detail, hopefully the pictures help bring it to life. The museum is one big dedication to anything and everything related to flight (of any kind) and space, so has exhibitions that have examples of things such as the earliest known example of a successful aeroplane designed by the Wright Brothers, to the very first capsule ("command center") to land on the moon in the Apollo 11 space shuttle. Of course, these weren't the only things on display, there were thousands of different showcases; WW1 and WW2 aeroplanes, rockets, space shuttles, banned nuclear rockets, interactive space exhibitions (with a fun quiz game in the centre), military equipment, UAV's (unmanned aerial vehicles)/predator missile drones, satellites, a lot of WW1/WW2 paraphernalia (such as medals of honour and commemorative displays), telescopes (old and new), scale models of other famous machines/vehicles such as the Hindenburg, actual moon rocks and much, much more! There were also flight simulators, however the tickets were not free like the actual museum admission, and the queues were quite big anyway so we gave them a miss unfortunately.

We spent about 2-3 hours in total, just walking around and looking at/reading the displays of all the various exhibits, before finally leaving at around 4:30pm. We looked at the map to find out the quickest route back to our hostel, realising we could walk straight down towards the Washington Monument, skirting around it to the WW2 memorial and heading up one street all the way back to the Allen Lee Hotel. We relaxed in the sun on a bench in the park where the monument is situated for a while, being approached by a photographer at one point, who insisted we have a free photograph taken in aid of a global clean drinking water campaign, and that the photo would be uploaded to their Facebook page so we could tag ourselves. We basically had to hold up an empty photo frame in front of us while he took the picture - something it seems everybody did - it must have been his 'theme'.

After sitting for a while, we continued around to the WW2 memorial and took a couple of photos there before carrying on up the street in the direction of our hotel. In all, it took about 30-40 minutes to get back and we detoured into CVS to get ourselves something to eat for tea. We took everything back to our room and basically relaxed for the rest of the evening, making use of our T.V, Emma's DS and the netbook to pass the time.

Today we woke up a little earlier (about 8:30am), after yesterday's mixup with the breakfast times. We had the same as usual - jam on toast - and came back to the room. We repeated yesterday's process of getting slowly ready, and pretty much left the hotel at exactly the same time. This time, we had looked for places to eat that were a little bit closer, seeing that there was a chicken place supposedly around the corner. We went in that direction, but after about half an hour spent looking, concluded that it was either invisible or simply not there anymore! Instead, our backup plan was to walk to Georgetown instead, where we had planned to go after eating anyway, only now, we hoped they had somewhere nice to get some food. It's quite a bit of a walk from where we were, so we once again checked our trusty map and came up with the quickest/easiest route in no time at all. It took us about 20 minutes to reach the edge of Georgetown, with the number of shops and eateries gradually increasing as we got further into the centre. We spotted a sign for a shopping centre and went towards it, hoping there would be a place inside to eat. As luck would have it, there was infact a full food court - though not everything was open since it's a Sunday - so we once again took a quick look at what was on offer.

We both opted to have a gyro with fries and a drink from another generic eatery near the entrance. Once we'd finished, we went back out onto the street and decided we should take a walk along the river that was visible at the bottom of the street. This is where our day becomes very boring to actually write about, since we literally just sat around in a park-type area with fountains, grass and trees, taking in the sights and sounds of the idealic setting. We sat on a bench in this area for about 20-30 minutes, before moving down to an area right on the river's edge that was already bustling with other people enjoying the sun. We lay down here for quite some time, even falling asleep, watching the people rowing/sailing/jet skiing/paddling up and down the river - with the occasional United States helicopter flying very low directly overhead.

Come about 3:30pm we started walking back to the hotel, as we had arranged to catch up with our families on Skype, and got there by about 4:00pm. We chatted for a couple of hours, then went to CVS to get some tea and coming back to the room. Craig took the netbook downstairs to watch his usual Minecraft videos and Emma relaxed in the room watching some T.V and playing her D.S, both ending up in bed by about midnight.

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