Day 23: Washington DC & Father’s Day

David kindly shared his Father’s Day with us. He gave us a tour of Washington DC and included us in his Father’s Day family dinner.

It is a one hour drive from Bowie to Washington DC. We went to the National Mall that stretches over 2 miles from the Lincoln Memorial on the west end, past the Washington Monument in the middle, to the U.S. Capitol on the east end. 

It was hot and getting hotter so we decided to walk around some of the memorials before escaping the heat into the Smithsonian Museums.

There are over 58,000 names inscribed in the Vietnam War Memorial wall. There is a difference between reading the number and reading the names. It was heartrending. There were people making pencil rubbings of names. I was 15 when the war ended and many thousands of boys on the wall were just a few years older than me.

Lincoln was a president with very big hands.

Einstein had very big hair.

Using the formula E=mc² and plugging in my mass you can estimate the gallons of sweat I produced walking around the monuments. We escaped the suns infrared waves by going into the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum. Imagine being in that museum with a NASA scientist as your guide. David worked on the Hubble Space Telescope and is currently working on the Wide Field Infrared Survey Telescope (WFIRST) that will be as sensitive as the Hubble Space Telescope, but have 100 times its field of view; every WFIRST image will be like 100 Hubble images.

We also spent some time in the National Gallery of Art. There was a special exhibit of “Nature’s Best Photography, where art meets science and technology”. Photographers from 51 countries sent more than 20,000 images, and the 82 winners are on display. Here are a few of our favorites.

We drove back to Davids house for dinner with his father, brother, and family. I was grateful to be included, and not have to spend Father's Day in a hotel room 3,000 miles away from my children.