The Windkey and the Lamplighter

The weekend of October 19-21 was a last-minute vacation to Washington,
D.C. It was our first actual vacation since our honeymoon,(we’d been
to a wedding and a funeral and a couple family visits, but not an
actual vacation) and I had never been, so we went. We got an awesome
deal at the Renaissance Mayflower hotel, near the Farragut Square
Metro stops, so we were walking distance from everything we visited
except the airport. That said, some experimentation with the Google
Distance Measurement Tool suggests that we walked over 20 miles, not
including all the walking inside the museums and monuments, in
approximately 48 hours. (Also, sometime during that I developed
not-pneumonia, in that it’s a nasty cough and wheezing that Brian
kept saying was pneumonia, but apparently isn’t quite according to my
doctor.)

On Friday, while waiting to check into the hotel, we had lunch at Luna
Cafe, which was very near the hotel on Connecticut and had very tasty
vegetarian nachos. My tuna melt was very salty but otherwise awesome,
and I was very jealous of Brian’s omelette-like thing and the homefries
it came with. B+

Afterward, we walked down to the Mall. The old Executive Building is
so cool. I think that is my favorite building-as-a-building (judging
on the basis of architecture rather than judging by what is inside) in
all of the parts of DC that I saw. The white house had a mob of
tourists taking pictures through the cast-iron-supplemented-with-wire
fence, which I thought was amusing—such pretty lawns, and nobody
gets to walk on them. (I suppose if people did, they’d look more like
the grass elsewhere on the Mall, since there were zillions of tourists
even in October, and the mobs of them reliably ignored the nicely
winding sidewalks in favor of the short route over the grass.)

We didn’t get to go up the Washington Monument, since it was closed by
the time we got there, but we walked all around it. We were walking
through the WW2 Memorial (which is beautiful and very fitting) when it
started to rain a little, but not enough to get us to turn back. After
all, I am not a witch, I am an engineer. I do not melt.

By the time we got to the Korean War monument, though, the ghostly,
haunted statues of soldiers in their ponchos looked like they were
much better dressed for the weather than we. By the time we got to
the Lincoln Memorial, we were quite damp, but the inside of it was
dry-enough, and the rain stopped while we were inside. The scale of
the Lincoln Memorial really does not translate in photographs. I’ve
seen hundreds of pictures of it (or the same picture hundreds of
times), but I still did not expect to be dwarfed by Lincoln’s likeness
as much as I was.

By the time we were done reading the walls of the Lincoln Memorial,
and admiring the fasces (which Brian had to point out to me, because I
have forgotten too much Roman history) it was raining less. We jumped
puddles at every intersection on the way back to the hotel, regrouped,
and set out for dinner.

The rain was nearly, but not quite stopped when we got to Levante’s,
so we waited for an inside table rather than sitting at the
only-slightly-damp umbrella tables. This was incredible foresight on
our part, as there was driving rain and screaming wind by the time we
finished our meal. Inside, it was a little noisy but dry and
comfortable—from our table you could see the big brick wood-fire
oven where the pizza boats and fresh bread are baked.
Despite our late lunch, we were starving, so we got an appetizer plate
with several tasty fried things and acceptable stuffed grape leaves
(I’m not a big fan of grape leaves served cold.) The real winner was
the fresh bread. I don’t know how Bertucci’s (which we walked past on
our way to Levante’s) manages to survive in D.C., because their best
feature (bread lumps) can’t hold a glutinous wood-fired candle to
Levante’s bread. Imagine gigantic thick home-made pita, then make
it thicker, serve it hot, and… I’m not sure what else they do to
it. It wasn’t greasy at all, so probably no butter or anything. It
dipped really well in the yogurt sauce from the appetizer plate,
though. (yum) My actual dinner was a Vegetable Pasticcio—kind of
like a lasagna—which was excellent. I was sorry I was too full for
dessert.

Saturday

Saturday was our museum day, which really meant our Air and Space
Museum day. We grabbed a quick coffee and pastries from a Caribou
coffee (and some tea for me, to try to quiet my increasingly annoying
cough) and were at the museum around opening time (which is 10 AM, so
not actually that early). On the way there, we walked past/through
the Hirshorn Sculpture Garden, which I’d love to go back to
someday. Even without stopping to look in detail, I noticed some
familiar-looking pieces—something by the same two artists who had
pieces outside the Denver Art Museum (the red sheet metal thing and
the broom-like thing). It would be nice to go back to D.C. to tour the
art museums.

But, we were not in D.C. to tour art museums, we were there for
airplanes and rocketships. And moon rocks. And, apparently, ENIAC
and Mary Lincoln’s purple dress, which were part of the "Treasures of
American History" exhibit on loan to the Air and Space Museum from the
American History Museum while it’s closed for renovations. I really
enjoyed looking at the WWII and WW! and world-explorer planes, and I
was really thrilled to see that they have Space Ship One in the entry
foyer now, but probably my favorite part of the whole museum was the
space artifacts section. They had a lunar lander (one of the spares,
obviously not one that actually went to the moon, and lots of space
suits and tools that did go and come back from the moon, which was
cool. They also had a neat exhibit on the recently-declassified
(well, 1995) CORONA project, the first spy satellite. It used
panoramic film whose canisters were dropped to earth and had to be
caught by Air Force C-119s. This is phenomenally cool. I am a total
sucker for spacecraft, spy stories, and therefore especially for
space-related spy stories. By the time we got chased out of the
museum at 5, though, my cold was getting a lot worse. The walk to
Dupont Circle, only about two and a half miles, took us well over an
hour because I was not able to walk very fast and was getting tired
pretty easily. (This is when Brian started telling me I had
pneumonia.) We did make it there, though, and I’m glad we did,
because we were able to have dinner in a bookstore. Afterwords,
which is an awesome name for a restaurant attached to a bookstore, had
good tea, pretty-good ravioli, "The best piece of bass in the city",
and the most amazing peach cobbler served warm with vanilla ice
cream. It was as good as my great-grandmother’s peach cobbler, and
that’s really saying something, because my memory of the latter is
tempered by a lot more time.

Sunday

After a night interrupted by multiple coughing fits, our
first stop Sunday morning was CVS for The Best Cough Medicine Ever.
It’s called Mucinex, it comes with pseudoephedrine (I was unhappy to
discover that buying pseudoephedrine requires ID—stupid
druggies—but happy that they were okay with my passport as ID, since
my wallet was still at work back in Massachusetts.) Our second stop,
though, was AfterWords again for brunch, which was delicious. We had
by this time missed the early service at the National Cathedral, so we
checked out of the hotel, left our luggage with the bellstand, and
went to the National Archives. I had not expected to be so impressed,
but the public exhibit at the Archives was awesome. We didn’t stand
in the hour-long line to see the Constitution and the Declaration of
Independence close-up, but we saw the brass plate made of the
Declaration , which is apparently in much better shape than the
Declaration itself. (This 1911 NYTimes story blames the creation of
the brass plate for the damage to the original Declaration.)
By the time we got through the neat exhibit on the education of the
presidents, we only had a little time to look at the normal public
exhibits before we had to start the (not as long as it felt) walk back
to our hotel to get our luggage and head for the airport. Even the
guaifenecin and pseudoephedrine were not enough by this point, but we
made it with only a couple stops for me to catch my breath, and we
were in plenty of time for our flight despite being only an hour
early. (I love the UsAir Shuttle. Apparently I love all Shuttles)

I’m looking forward to going back to Our Nation’s Capitol, especially
to visit the Udvar-Hazy center to see the Enterprise. Clearly next
time we should fly into Dulles—but the Shuttle doesn’t go to where
the Shuttle lives. (Very sad)
We’ll figure something out.