If your brother-in-law is an aerospace engineer, and if said brother-in-law comes to stay with you for a long weekend, let me recommend taking him to the National Air and Space Museum near Dulles. He will love it. Trust me. Ian went bananas over it. Actually, I don't think British people go bananas; they're too reserved for that. But Ian did smile a lot.
A co-worker of Tony's volunteers as a docent at the museum and agreed to come in Saturday afternoon to show us around. So Tony, Ian, and I piled into the car with Dr. V, a friend we met through my sister, and Dr. V's sister, Erin, who was visiting for the weekend, and the five of us made the 45-minute trek out to Dulles.
I'm generally not someone who enjoys looking at airplanes. But honest, I enjoyed myself during our tour, and I stayed focused for two whole hours. This is the museum that houses the Enola Gay, the plane that dropped the Little Boy atomic bomb on Hiroshima. It's an emotional exhibit.
The biggest crowd in the museum was at the Discovery space shuttle. Everyone in D.C. remembers that morning in April when the space shuttle flew over Washington. Super cool to see it up close and in person.
And apparently we don't know exactly how fast or how high this reconnaissance plane, the SR-71 Blackbird, can travel because that's classified. But we do know that on its last flight it made it from LAX to Dulles in just over an hour.
And this spacesuit amused me. NASA needed spacesuits that would put enough pressure on the astronauts' bodies, so their blood wouldn't start to boil, which apparently happens in space. NASA turned to a Playtex company to design the early space suits because they definitely are the experts on supporting and tucking.
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