We got into our hotel room early today at 5:00pm. It, like yesterday, was pretty much a road day but we did get in two sites.

We made an unscheduled visit the Flight 93 Memorial in central Pennsylvania this morning. There is really not much there to see but the placards strategically placed around the site gave it a serious feeling. For those of you who might not remember Flight 93 was one of the four planes that the terrorists hijacked on 9/11. It was the only one that did not make it to its target. It went down twenty minutes short of the Capital. About the only thing that is there is a quarter-mile walk with a black wall and marble slabs with the names of the victims.

The second stop, besides lunch, was to the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum. Yeah, we finally made it to the D.C. area. This museum is a new one for us. It was built after our 1988 trip. The most viewed thing in the museum is the Space Shuttle Discovery. It was bigger  and also cruder than I imagined. Yvonne said she thought the upper part looked like it was made from paper mache.  The picture here is kind of eerie with the light shining on it. It reminded me of the movie “Close Encounters of the Third Kind”. Speaking of that they also had the model of that ship there and it is about 3 feet in diameter! That’s Hollywood for you.   I also got another peak of my favorite plane and that is the SR-71 Blackbird. That plane has always fascinated me!

Maybe I am just getting used to this tour bus stuff as there is nothing much to say about it today. 🙂  We are getting to know the others on the tour. They are a bunch of nice folks.  We are scheduled for a group dinner in about ten minutes so I better get moving. Tomorrow is a full day starting with a White House tour..

More about that later.

Postscript:

We learned at dinner that we will have to get up around 5:30 in the morning to meet the White House schedule. It is almost unreal as to the rules you have to follow to be allowed on the White House grounds now. No this, no that, no just about anything.  I will probably be too sleepy to even remember the tour and since no cameras are allow I hope I have something to report about it tomorrow night. (ha).