We are staying at Bull Run Regional Park in Centreville, Virginia, for the next several days. We actually arrived here yesterday afternoon after making the two hour drive from Gettysburg, PA.
This is our home on wheels!
Today is a very special day because 33 years ago today we were married. It doesn't seem possible...I mean, how could Kitty put up with me all that time! It's a mircale!
Anyway, to celebrate our anniversary, we have several things we plan to do today. The first is a short drive to the Smithsonian Air & Space Museum in Chantilly, VA.
That's Kitty standing at the entrance to the museum.
This place has all kinds of flying machines from some of the early Wright Brothers flying machines to some of the latest space travel machines, big and small, it has them all! As you will see in some of these pictures, they really crammed a lot of machines into every available space. You could spend days here and not see everything.
In the interest of time and space, I am only going to show a tiny bit here in this blog. I have three technical catagories to show you in this blog. In highly technical aeronautical language, the three categories are big planes, space machines, and small personal size stuff. (That's about as technical as I can get here!)
Here's a small sample of the big planes we saw.
stealth military aircraft.
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The Concord
This is the B-29 that dropped the atomic bomb on Japan!
The Space Machines!
The Discovery flew 39 orbital missions and spent 365 days in space and traveled 150 million miles! (That's a lot of miles between oil changes!) The Discovery last flew in 2011 on the 133rd space shuttle mission.
These are the small personal size machines. They all look like something you would see James Bond flying around in!
After our walking tour, we stepped into the attached Imax theater and saw a 43 minute movie on the Hubble Space Telescope narrated by Leonard DiCaprio. This movie was a fascinating, up close look at the problems the astronauts had repairing the telescope. The Hubble Space Telescope is thought to be the most important tool ever developed by man. Not only have the scientist learned so much more about our planet, they have found things in space that they never knew existed and now have a better understanding of our universe, our neighboring planets, and the solar systems beyond the reach of earthly telescopes.
Naturally, there is so much more to see here than what I am able to shown you. I am still sorting through all of the pictures we took while we were here! We both found this to be a very interesting place, and wish we could spend a little more time here. But, we must move on to our next adventure today. Stay tuned!
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