Tuesday 18 October: Washington

Tuesday was a day of some frustrations. Our connecting flight from Denver to Farmington the next day was rescheduled, so we decided to take a later flight from Washington to Denver. After much messing about (including Yes US Airways are listed in the phone book at this address, but they haven't been here for at least two years), we got hold of an "operative" who informed us that yes we could take a later flight, but it would cost us US$100 per ticket. We declined. More on this in tomorrow's episode....

We spent much of the day looking at the various monuments in the mall. Some of them are very well done, if a bit jingoistic. The World War II memorial is really good apart from a couple of OTT sculptures. However the central fountain had been drained and there was maintenance work under way, which severely limited our picture opportunities. The Korean war memorial is a group of bronze sculptures representing a platoon of infantry on patrol. It is very effective - our friend Bob Tomerlin has some excellent pictures of it. In contrast the Vietnam war memorial is a simple black wall engraved with the names of all 58,000 American service personnel who were killed in that needless, senseless war. The Lincoln memorial was a bit disappointing. The statue of Lincoln is bigger than we expected, but somehow not as impressive. Perhaps the inevitable scaffolding detracted from the impact of the statue.

In the afternoon we visited the Smithsonian air & space museum. This is most impressive. The main halls include some of the actual aircraft and spacecraft which made history - Charles Lindburgh's Spirit of St Louis, the command module of Apollo 11, one of the original Gemini capsules and many many more. We also visited the planetarium. Unlike the one in New York, this was a no-frills affair which had a live commentator operating the projector and describing the night sky. Simple, but very effective.

In the evening we went monument shooting again. We hadn't yet seen the Washington monument up close. It looks much the same as it does from a distance - tall and white. The fountain at WWII was still out of action, but we managed to get some reasonable pictures.

Got back to the hotel, put a load of washing through the in-house laundromat (gotta love the Holiday Inn) and ordered room service for dinner. We booked a shuttle for 6:20 the next morning (ugh!) and settled down for a short night's sleep.