OUR TRIP TO WASHINGTON D.C. ~ DAY 5, JUNE 7 ~ 2017

We could easily walk to the National Air and Space Museum as it was in an area of the Mall that was across the street from our hotel. 

We had a lot of fun in this museum--Neil and Elijah especially. This plane is Charles Lindbergh's Spirit of St. Louis.

Gemini IV space capsule

Mercury Friendship 7

How hot is the sun? On June 6, 2017 at 15:00 o'clock, it was 4.5 million degrees F.

Soyuz

Infrared camera measuring body heat displayed on a screen--Elijah could not resist checking out his armpit heat 😅

It's always good to have a backup as NASA knows well 

When Neil was an engineering student at TTU, he got to work study at NASA George C. Marshall Space Flight Center at Redstone Arsenal in Huntsville, Alabama, where he worked on experiments for the Skylab project. They had a full sized mock up of Skylab in a huge water tank there and we got to see the astronauts training in weightlessness. Way cool stuff.

Neil Armstrong's space suit from the Apollo 11 mission--first man to walk on the moon

Apollo 11 checklists

Mercury flight operation manual signed by Alan Shepard

"Failure is not an option."
"Ok, Houston, we've had a problem here." The words actually spoken, initially by Command Module Pilot Jack Swigert.  After being prompted to repeat the transmission by CAPCOM Jack R. Lousma, mission commander Jim Lovell responded, "Uh, Houston, we've had a problem." 
If you saw the movie Apollo 13, you'll remember the phrase the movie script coined: 'Houston, we have a problem.' And you'll know this vest (and also the Apollo 13 button) worn by Gene Kranz, (played by Ed Harris) director of NASA missions operations during Gemini and Apollo missions and lead flight director during Apollo 13.   It's an amazing story and one of my favorite movies.





We ended up at Mickey D's again for lunch. So did everybody else in the museum. It's a captive audience after all. But the process moved efficiently and quickly for government work.

This looks familiar

Elijah wandered over to the big windows for a moment to see the view and came back to the table with an interesting story: A teenage boy at one of the tables around the corner from ours recognized Elijah from his gaming YouTube channel. The guy said to him "You're BeastMoBilly." Elijah said yes and the guy told him he liked his gaming videos. It's a small world after all, y'all. How crazy is that?! It made Elijah's day to say the least.

After lunch, we enjoyed a short 3D movie in the IMAX theater.

It was a fascinating look at the future of space travel and the planned manned mission to Mars.

And we got to wear these way cool 3D glasses.

After the movie and learning how NASA plans to send humans to Mars to live and work and hopefully survive, we ended our museum visit by gawking at the Wright Brothers plane. You could get whiplash from the time travel alone.

And just so you know...this is the real deal, well, except for the fabric covering

However, this is not the real Orville Wright flying the plane

Our last museum visit of the day was the Archives of the United States of America where we saw the Charters of Freedom: Declaration of Independence, Bill of Rights, and the Constitution. And also an exemplified copy of Magna Carta 1297  (Exemplifications can only be attested and executed by either the authority holding the record or the issuing authority. Exemplified copies are also usually an extract or transcript made directly from the original.)  During the American Revolution, Magna Carta served to inspire and justify action in liberty’s defense. The colonists believed they were entitled to the same rights as Englishmen, rights guaranteed in Magna Carta. They embedded those rights into the laws of their states and later into the Constitution and Bill of Rights. The Fifth Amendment to the Constitution ("no person shall . . . be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.") is a direct descendent of Magna Carta's guarantee of proceedings according to the "law of the land."  Magna Carta, first issued in 1215 by King John of England, established for the first time that the king was subject to the law, not above it, and set out a new political order. It is widely viewed as one of the most important legal documents in the history of democracy https://www.archives.gov/
These documents are an amazing sight to see for any American

Photography was forbidden in the document room, unfortunately. So I snapped a shot of these three tourists. Does Neil qualify as a relic?
And that's our history lesson for the day.

Elijah bought this cool plasma ball at the air and space museum gift shop.
I Googled it:  A plasma globe or plasma lamp (also called plasma ball, dome, sphere, tube or orb, depending on shape) is (usually) a clear glass sphere filled with a mixture of various noble gases with a high-voltage electrode in the center of the sphere. Plasma filaments extend from the electrode to the glass when electricity is supplied, creating fascinating beams of colored light. Tesla called his invention an "inert gas discharge tube".
When you touch the globe, it looks like arcs of lightning coming from the electrode. How cool is that?
There's a science geek in all of us.

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OUR TRIP TO WASHINGTON D.C. ~ DAY 6, JUNE 8 ~ 2017

Ford's Theater is an interesting museum. President Abraham Lincoln was assassinated here, Good Friday, April 14, 1865 by actor and political activist/fanatic John Wilkes Booth.

We sat in the packed theater and listened to a National Parks Ranger tell the story of the events that led up to the assassination. 

After shooting Lincoln, Booth jumped from the balcony onto the stage, a 12 foot drop. His spur caught on the flag and nicked the framed picture hanging there, causing his awkward landing on the stage floor. No wonder he broke his leg. But that didn't stop him from running away.

There is nothing here original to that night in history. Some say it was haunted after the assassination, and the history of the theater itself is filled with misfortune. It burned at one point and was rebuilt and later on down the line of time refurbished to replicate the way it looked on that night in 1865.

When we were here back in the early 1990's, you could stand outside the booth where Lincoln was shot and see it up close and personal. Lincoln sat in a rocking chair that night, but that is long gone. We heard that some construction workers sat in it at one point in time and broke it. 

We had to wait another day to go to the museum here in the basement. Ticket rationing from day to day. Crowd control, I suppose. Makes it inconvenient for the tourist.

Shelby was stylin' in this Lincoln top hat she found in the gift shop. 

Our tickets for this day also gave us access to Petersen House which is the house where Lincoln was brought after the shooting, but there were long long lines (school trip kids again) waiting to go inside the house, so we found a Starbucks down the street and had some breakfast. Starbucks was our go-to every morning for breakfast. There was one with an entrance from our hotel which was convenient. Nice place to hang out while we waited.

 

Petersen House across the street from Ford's Theater--the story goes that the doctor knew Lincoln's death was imminent and no one wanted him to die in a theater of all places, considered an "uncouth" place in 1865

Between visits to her husband, Mary Lincoln waited in this parlor. She was not with him when he died.

In the room where Lincoln died

Not the bed where Lincoln died. Disappointed to find out much of the artifacts such as the bed he died in have been moved to a museum in Chicago. When we were here long ago, we got to see the actual bed and the bloody pillow where he laid and died. 

John Wilkes Booth on the left playing Julius Caesar. He reminds me of Lee Harvey Oswald in this picture.

Sergeant Boston Corbett, left, shot and killed Booth.

The Tower of Books about Lincoln

Some 15,000 books have been written about Lincoln — more books than have been written about any other person in world history, with the exception of Jesus Christ. The tower measures about eight feet around and 34 feet — that's three and a half stories tall.

Our next stop was the White House. Looks like we're pretty close in this picture.

But we were really far far away

Hard to pose for a selfie when the sun is so bright in your eyes

A nice fellow tourist offered to take our group picture. We said yes. And then I took his camera and made his family's picture. I don't think I saw one selfie stick the whole time we were here. Maybe because they're banned everywhere inside the government buildings so people know better than to bother with them.

We were all tired and hungry because Starbucks had worn off ages ago, and we had walked what seemed like a thousand miles from Ford's Theater to the White House. Neil Googled restaurants and several popped up in the area but we walked in circles trying to find them. Major frustration for hungry bordering on hangry tourists. A Panera Bread had popped up on that map and that sounded really good but it was nowhere to be found. We finally asked for directions. You know that's always the last resort. We did locate it. I think we probably walked past it a time or two. These places are either inside a larger building or their storefront isn't all that obvious in the grand scheme of things. Not to us, anyway. But we finally got to enjoy a very late lunch of good soup and sandwiches. No more hangry.

That big sister look you get when your little brother is bugging you....

...but you're too tired to care

I vote this the Best Selfie Ever

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