Day 2-162 Wonderful (long) day in Washington, DC

We started off the day about 9:00 am with a short walk to the adjacent marina that has a pretty good marine store. We needed to buy a replacement bottle of hydraulic fluid for the steering system. If you remember two days ago we had used up the last of our supply of hydraulic fluid to partially fill the reservoir. That additional fluid corrected the "sloppy" slow responding steering problem. However, we still need to add a little more fluid to make the reservoir properly filled.

Then it was off for a little museum viewing. The weather forecast for today indicated rain starting about 2:00 pm so we wanted to get an early start. First we walked about a mile to the National Museum of American Indians. We had been told that the best cherry blossoms in DC had been about a week ago but that the same storm that had delayed us in Norfolk had also blown away many of the cherry blossoms. Fortunately, there are still plenty of trees that seem to be in full bloom. Wow!

Well, the Admiral says that I am vain. She took this picture of me taking pictures so I just HAD to include it as well. In spite of me, these cherry blossoms are pretty as well...

Anyway, as you can see the walk to the museum was quite a beautiful trip.

Neither of us had been to the American Indian Museum before, and it was quite a nice experience. One of the first things that we did was to have lunch, and that was spectacular. They had four different serving areas with each one featuring a selection of foods from different nations/tribes. I had a squid ceviche and southern squash (butternut squash). The ceviche was outstanding! The picture on the right was taken from the top (fourth) floor looking down into a central area with three hand made boats. We saw a movie and toured several of the many informational displays/exhibits. Then it was off to our second (and as it turned out) final museum of the day.

Along the way we walked across the mall that extends from the Capitol Building to the Washington Memorial. If you remember, the monument suffered some damage during an earthquake several years ago, The scaffolding up the sides has been removed in only the past few days, but the monument is not yet open to visitors. The picture at the left is up the Mall toward the Capitol Building. The Washington Monument was about the same distance away directly behind me.

What was the second museum that we visited? Of all things, it was the Spy Museum. The Admiral wanted to see it, and well, Admirals do usually get their way. Actually, it was quite interesting. It was an eclectic mix of about half James Bond and had really spies and their tools of the trade. Cassette tape players really became a big thing around 1970, but it seems that spies had been using similar looking tape recorders for as much as 20 years before that. There were cameras of every size and shape, etc. There was also a fair amount of history of spying particularly during the 20th century. As stated earlier, there was also a lot of information about how James Bond worked as a spy, including this Aston Martin as seen in Goldfinger (and several other Bond movies I believe). One of the interesting factoids was that facial recognition software was used in a Bond movie about 20 years before it became readily available (for non-spies at least).

Then we headed back to Lucky Us for a little R&R before Lori picked us up for a really great dinner at one of those non-tourist restaurants that are known to locals. This final picture was taken as we said goodbye back at the Capitol Marina. Thanks Lori for a great evening!