The tour continues...

Tuesday, September 10th.

Tuesday morning brought another Wonder Bread breakfast in the nice surroundings of Greenbelt park. On the bright side, though, the alarm system kept quiet when we emerged from the van.

In lieu of available phone lines we went to the Greenbelt public library to check email. We then headed for Falls Church, southwest of D.C., hoping to get in contact with Dan's mom's college roommate Sandy who lives there. Trying to avoid the downtown traffic we made a big loop around the city, making a stop in the town of Chevy Chase to take a picture in front of the "welcome to Chevy Chase" sign :)

Arriving in Falls Church we refilled our gas tank and then caught the tail-end of the lunch buffet at Pizza Hut. And did a pretty good job of cleaning out their buffet... :)
We got a hold of Sandy and were invited to visit her and camp out at her place overnight. She'd be at work the rest of the afternoon, so we took the Metro into the city again. We split up once we got in there, and Jens spent the afternoon looking around town and visiting the Holocaust Museum. Dan made a quick stop at the Smithsonian Castle and then headed directly for the Air & Space Museum. Walking up to the building he could see the airplanes and rockets on display behind the tinted glass walls and overheard security personnel ironically discussing the terror threat of a plane trying to crash into the museum from the outside...
Entering the museum he re-experienced the the sense of magic and awe that he'd felt when he visited the museum as a boy 9 years ago. For a young boy dreaming of once becoming a pilot the museum was as holy a shrine as anything in the world. And even now the sight of the Wright brothers' flyer and Lindbergh's Spirit of St. Louis found him daydreaming his afternoon away.

Reunited, we took the metro back to Falls Church and found Sandy's condo. She turned out to be great fun and was very helpful also in helping us plan our continuing tour of D.C. and the rest of the country. She took us out to a great dinner at a local Mexican restaurant, and when we got back we showed her some of the pictures from the trip so far and she got out her atlas and suggested points of interest across the country that we might want to visit on out trip.