27 September to 3 October 2024

We were driving to the DC area again for one reason – to celebrate my friend Meredith. In the 30-something years that we have known each other, we have never managed to be in the right place at the right time to celebrate our birthdays together. And this year, especially after her cancer journey, and while we were so relatively close, there was just no way I was going to not be there with her to mark another, albeit turbulent, turn around the sun.

But while we were there for a week and Meredith had to work, we managed to squeeze in just a couple more of DC’s incredible museums.

We had already had a slightly disappointing visit to the National Air and Space Museum in DC itself but someone had highly recommended its annex out near Dulles Airport.

And they were not wrong. It was the most incredible place. An enormous hanger housing some of air and space’s greatest stars from the very first flying machines to the futuristic looking SR 31 Blackbird spy plane, built in 1966 and which could fly at 2,200 miles an hour.

Amongst them was a plane I feel a very personal connection with. My Uncle Barry was an aerodynamicist who contributed to the design of Concorde.

But there were two exhibits that we were not expecting to see and which left very lasting but very different impressions.

In a separate hanger, we found an actual space shuttle. The Discovery shuttle made missions into space between 1988 to 2011 before retiring to the museum.

The sheer size of it completely blew us away. It was so much bigger than it looked on a tiny TV screen in the 1980s. It also looked surprisingly makeshift with its heat proof tiles tacked on its outside!

Now, we had been pre-warned that the museum also housed the Enola Gay and we knew it would be a complicated sight to see. I have stood at the ruined A-Bomb Dome at the epicentre of the nuclear bomb dropped on Hiroshima. Coming full circle and seeing the plane that dropped it was a completely visceral experience and I am not ashamed to have burst into tears at the thought of the devastation wrought in that city by this shiny, silver tube, seemingly unremarkable amongst so many other famous planes.

Our second museum outing was to the very grand National Portrait Gallery. With its covered courtyard we could have been back at the British Museum in London.

The first exhibit to grab our attention was a spectacular sculpture that spanned the length of one of the museum’s balconied galleries. Two hundred golden arms, fists clenched – a cast of the outstretched arm of Tommie Smith who, along with John Carlos, raised his black gloved fists on the medal podium at the Mexico Olympic Games in 1968 in a now iconic act of solidarity in the fight for civil rights.

Elsewhere, we found portraits of other icons of music, literature, liberty and the law – including two more of the Notorious RBG.

And we found portraits of Presidents familiar to us (some not worthy of space in this blog!)

and some not so familiar. It took us a while to work out Andy Warhol’s image of JFK but we are now beginning to know our Thomas Woodrow-Wilson from our John Adams.

You remember that on our first trip to DC we discovered that Abraham Lincoln had been assassinated just at the very end of the Civil War? Well, to make up for our shameful lack of US history knowledge, we walked a couple of blocks from the museum to find the site of the shooting, Ford’s Theatre, and the house opposite where Lincoln was taken but succumbed to his injuries the next day.

We also walked from there back up to the White House in a second attempt for Stefan to get a closer look but once again he was thwarted by security. The only people being allowed anywhere near were the US Olympic team members. We saw them returning out from their homecoming celebration with the President.

Along the way there was plenty of evidence of the coming election for its next incumbent.

But mostly we had lots of lovely time to share with my wonderful friend. On a walk of her hometown, Rockville, we learnt of the town’s significance in key episodes of US history, from the severance of ties with Great Britain in 1774, through the Civil War to the Civil Rights movement and another example of the contribution of Thurgood Marshall. In 1936, in the case of Gibbs v Broome heard at the County Circuit Court in Rockville, he successfully argued that a Black teacher with the same qualifications as white teachers should receive the same pay.

Bizarrely, in the centre of Rockville, we bumped into a German Octoberfest festival, complete with strundel and German sausage stalls, a beer tent and even a man in lederhosen!

On Meredith’s actual birthday we had a walk on the Underground Railroad Experience Trail, once used by runaway enslaved people seeking safety in the North

and finished with a wonderful vegan meal in very pretty Bethesda, a nearby suburb.

We left Maryland, or Mereland as we now call it, fuelled by the best hugs this side of the Pond and promising to return again.

On our way back we stopped at the city of Alexandria, which we had passed on the Potomac on our way in to DC with Pintail. It is a very pretty place, reminiscent of Charleston with its red brick buildings and rainbow painted houses

It was clear that summer was over and autumn, or fall as they call it here, had well and truly arrived.

It was also clear that Halloween was on its way and that here it was a very big thing indeed!

As we headed back to Pintail in Deltaville, we had some big adjustments to make. And it wasn’t just the changing of the seasons…