Trip to the Udvar-Hazey museum

Greetings and Salutations Readers! I come to you from the Keystone state of Pennsylvania, recently of the Empire State of New York. I am dreadfully behind in posting due to a complete lack of connectivity in said Empire State. Very Frustrating to one as verbose as moi. So, catching up will have to be done.
We spent time in Washington DC. At this point I can't remember when. But it was fun. One of the things we did there was to see the Udvar-Hazey air and space museum. It's out by Dulles airport and I can not recommend it highly enough. Boeing has a wing out there, the Dash 80 is there, and it's just extremely well done. Even if you are not an airplane person, you will enjoy it. The staff has done a wonderful job of adding a human element to the exhibits. Here are some pictures for your viewing enjoyment.

The Blackbird. The coolest thing to ever take flight. I can't believe they don't make this plane anymore.


The original shuttle. This is the one they would dump off the 747 to see if it would actually glide or just sink like a rock. She never got to go into space.



Apollo command module. Can you believe they sent people into space in these things? And they lived?


This is the model used in the filming of Close Encounters of the Third Kind. It was the mother ship that landed in Wyoming before Richard Dreyfuss got to go live with the aliens. Apparently the model makers had a sense of humor and glued R2D2, a Volkswagon, fighters and other assorted objects to the model. We could only find R2. He was easy to spot.




The gorgeous Stratoliner. This is the one they restored, took out on a test flight, ran out of gas and ditched in Puget Sound. She has been re-restored.


What the heck is this, you may well ask. This was the "basket" for a balloon that went across the ocean (the Atlantic, I think) in the 70's. They used a catamaran in case they had to ditch in the water. It's just amazing what people will do.


This is a close up of the boat. They had a chemical toilet.


They could make tea.


They had lawn chairs.


That's a red cooler next to the porta-potty, with a Hershey bar and a loaf of Wonderbread.


This is the Enola Gay. It's just eerie standing there, thinking about what that plane accomplished.



One of the Concords. Such a pretty plane.


So, this catches me up with air and space museum part of the DC stage of the trip. Still to go... The Smithsonian!

As of today, September 10th, we are in Lancaster PA. The world's biggest RV show is in Hershey, about an hour away from here. We were not able to get an RV park any closer due to all of the people going to the show. It's in a rural part of the state, and it's just beautiful. We came down over a hill, and as far away as the horizon we could see corn, and silos and white farm houses. It was pretty spectacular.

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