AU NATUREL

May 23, 2012     Amid more rain warnings, but no actual pluie, we hied off to College Park Station for the metro into town, armed with our slickers.

Our target today was the Museum of Natural History, a grabbag of subjects if ever there was one.  However, we found them to be well organized and presented and we had a good time.  Any good MNH has to have dinosaurs, and we had plenty including a T-Rex and a bunch of swimmy things.  Sorry, I didn’t take notes.

 

More swimmy things!

Ecce homo?  And friend.

There were a gazillion kids throughout the museum.  The smaller ones seemed fascinated, but the teens mostly just walked in groups talking to each other without looking at anything.  Sad.  One of our favorite areas was the minerals and gemstones exhibits.  We last were here around 1994, when Michael was about 12.  I know we saw much of this stuff then, and wonder if it sparked his interest in geology, his subsequent major and profession.  Anyway, it’s neat stuff.  Those huge chunks in the top right picture are gold!

My favorite piece is below, at left.  Loni’s with one huge chunk of quartz (?).  Where’s Mike when you need him?

 

The gem collection was none too shabby, either.  Here are my two favorites, the deep-blue 44.5 carat Hope Diamond, and the Montana Butterfly, a gold brooch with 333 Montana sapphires.

Now for the sublime and the ridiculous.  The Smithsonian is not above a little cheezy sensationalism.  You may have read about this discovery in the last few years.  They shamelessly promote it.

 

The sublime came in the form of some of the most beautiful photographs of wildlife I’ve ever seen.  I’m glad we caught this exhibit before it left.

By the end of the afternoon we were whipped.  This is a huge place, and a sensory overload.  One last look at the large gallery, and we headed out.

Never did need our slickers, but lugged them around all day.

MUDDLED AND LOST

May 22, 2012   The predicted rains did not materialize, but it’s more museum today.  We had long wanted to see the new-er American Indian Museum, having read a lot about it in various magazines.  You can’t trust everything you read.

To get to the museum from the metro stop we had to traverse the Mall.  If you watched the Inauguration last month, it probably looked pretty much as you always remembered.  Well, not so back last May.  It was all ripped up for various replanting, pipe replacement, and various repairs.  No reflecting pool, no beautiful vista.  Just a construction zone.

The Indian Museum on the outside resembles the Museum of Civilization in Ottawa, with it’s curving wall structure, that we visited on the Canadian bus tour earlier this month. 

That’s the end of the similarity.  The MOC was vastly superior in content and presentation.  The Indian Museum easily was the biggest disappointment of this trip.  It was poorly organized and frequently so dimly/poorly lit as to be unviewable.  Apparently they gave a general format to every tribe under the sun, and each tribe then submitted its choice of content within that framework.  The result is an endless series of airless displays that bore you to tears, often resembling an amateur effort of “throw it all on the wall and see what sticks.”

I really hate to trash the place, but we were expecting so much more.  For a much better effort, visit either the Ottawa museum or the Museum of the Cherokee Indian.  The cafeteria featured alleged Indian-inspired dishes which, quite frankly, looked like muck, although I will say they were flavorful.  Below right is Loni’s tomato-olive-salt cod concoction, and at left my goat meat, corn, and chili melange. 

Since there was little to keep us here and fill up the day, we left and wandered over to East Gallery of Art, the knife-edged building designed by I.M. Pei in his earlier career.  Unfortunately, the exterior is shrouded in scaffolding for refurbishment, so you couldn’t really appreciate the architecture.

Inside, the signage was deplorable.  We looked in vain for the exhibit of French paintings, and ended up asking a couple of employees how to get there.  Finding a rest room was even worse.  The 3rd floor guard directed us down to the 2nd level and through the steel doors.  The doors were locked.  The 2nd floor guard sent us to floor 4 at the opposite end of the building.  I felt like just peeing over the bannister.  We weren’t allowed to photograph the paintings, so all I could capture was the Calder mobile, still dangling where I last saw it 30 years ago. 

All in all, not much of a day.  Time to pack it in and head back to the rig.

AMERICAN MISCELLANY

May 24, 2012     It rained last night and continued to be drizzly this morning, so a perfect day to spend inside at a museum.  We took our #83 bus from the park to the College Park metro station, then the Green Line to the Archives station.  From there it is an easy walk to most of the museums.  But first, I wanted to stop at my old stomping grounds of my first employer.  I was back here only for special projects and was based in the L.A. regional office. 

We decided to take in the American History Museum, figuring that would consume the entirety of the day.  Pretty ugly on the outside, it’s a treasure trove inside.

Like the Air Force Museum, there’s just too much to cover in any one report.  The things that stood out for us most were the transportation section, which had a lot of trains and automotive dioramas,

They even had a section on RV’s!

Loni particularly enjoyed the Presidents & First Ladies exhibit, but the costumes were a yawner for me.  I did like some of the artifacts, like Lincoln’s watch and top hat.

Caution!  Religion rant ahead!  The best of the lot, for me, were the “Jefferson Bible” and the volumes he used to create it.  Jefferson created his own personal Christian tome by excising from the four Gospels only those portions that reflected Jesus’ own teachings, and ignoring things that he could not accept through reason, such as the resurrection and the miracles, or which he thought were later embellishments.  Through this distillation, he sought to clarify Jesus’ teachings, which he considered provided “the most sublime and benevolent code of morals which has ever been offered to man.”  AMEN, brother!  Now that’s a religious view that I could get behind.  Cut the magic crap and go with the message.  Unfortunately, his viewpoint will never gain traction.  It undercuts the my-way-or-the-highway power play that has always underlain the organized forms of the Christian and Muslim faiths, and the irrationalities of the belief in a supreme being that would sanction the atrocities performed by the “faithful” in its name.  OK, we now return you to your regular programming.

 

 

The museum is not just a repository of significant artifacts. You can gaze with awe at Judy’s ruby slippers, Action Comics, and Lou Gehrig’s mitt!

There is a rotunda area within the museum and we happened to pass by as a large number of school kids were milling below.  They started to organize themselves, and this was the result.

As we headed back to the park, the drizzle stopped.  Good thing, because when we got back to the College Park station, we just missed our bus and had to wait in the open for over an hour before the next one arrived.  The perils of public transportation.  Loni fixed a nice cassoulet for dinner, and we watched the series finale of “House.”  Not quite a “Mash” moment.

WE BRAVE D.C. PUBLIC TRANSIT: Mt. Vernon

May 19-20, 2012    Saturday the 19th, our first day here, we decided to just veg for the day.  We needed some down time after all the travel of the past several weeks.  We perused the camp store, Loni bought a hat, I bought ice cream, and we just flaked out.  Mushroom pasta for dinner.  Yum!

Sunday we decided to go to Mt. Vernon, Washington’s home.  It’s 27-odd miles from the campground via surface streets (we would take the scoot, not the rig), and we didn’t feel up to trying our GPS-less (on the scoot) navigation skills in this wholly unfamiliar area, so public transit it is. 

One of the bonuses about the CHRVP is that a city bus has a stop right inside the park.  The bus takes you to one of two subway stations, depending on the day and hour, and from there you can make your way all the way down to Mt. Vernon.  The park sells passes, and there’s even a half-price one for seniors, good on both buses and subway.  It costs $5, but you then have to fill it up with value at one of the machines at the subway.  We were off!

Well, we didn’t break any speed records getting there.  Took us 2 1/2 hours to cover the 27 miles, although I’m sure we covered more than that as the bus at each end has to wander its route.  On the way down, we took two buses and 2 metro lines, and missed the proper metro connection as the schedule changes on weekends, a fact undisclosed in our guidebook.  The stops near our park are on the green line, at College Park and Greenbelt.  Mt. Vernon lies at the end of the yellow line, at Huntington.  We had to take a bus from there to Mt. Vernon proper.  At least the metros are clean and relatively quiet.  A far cry from the wooden coaches in Buenos Aires.

Once we got there it was all worth it.  Again, if you have any yen for history, standing within the very rooms in which these historical figures lived their lives is a tingly experience.  Mt. Vernon was saved back in 1860 when it was purchased from the family by the Mt. Vernon Ladies Association, which has preserved it for us to enjoy many generations later. 

Neither of us has much regard for Washington’s military skills (it’s a miracle we won the war), but he certainly was charismatic to his men and was blessed with a type of integrity and “country first” attitude that present day politicians don’t even try to emulate.  The grounds are beautiful.  The house sits on a hill high above the river.  It’s neat to see paintings of the view from his time that match what you see today.

The above left view is from the back of the house, pictured below.  You can sit on the porch and recreate George’s scene.  They hold a lot of events on the lawn, but when nothing is going on visitors are welcome to flop down or have a picnic.

We weren’t able to take any interior photos of the main house (they gotta sell those picture books!), but we were able to shoot outbuildings and slave quarters.

Ah, yes, there was food.  And surprisingly good for a tourist attraction.  We ate at the Mt. Vernon Inn, starting with their signature peanut/chestnut soup.  Loni had a duck cassoulet while I opted for the salmon corn cakes.  We finished with a bread pudding and were stuffed.  Again, no dinner tonight.

The return trip was a little faster (2hrs) because we now knew the proper transfer point on the metro.  When we got back, we took the scoot to a nearby market for a little grocery shopping.  On our return, we found another Lazy Daze had pulled in.  A couple from  Ohio who originally came from Chino, CA.  The cloudy skies turned into rain overnight, but it just lulled us to sleep all the faster.

COUNTRY ROADS, TAKE ME OUTTA HERE

May 16-17, 2012.  Put a sock in it, Denver.  We left Columbus on Highway 50.  Middle Ohio is pretty flat farmland, but as you work your way East, it becomes hilly and wooded.  Regardless, 50 through here was a fine road, gentle curves, divided, and decent paving.  Then we got to West Virginia.

The road narrowed to two lanes and wandered through many small towns. 

Normally, that’s exactly how we like to go so we can see “real” America.  But the road became very narrow, with no shoulder whatsoever.  Tiny lanes fine for a car, but really not meant for an RV.  In fact, we saw nary a one as we white knuckled it around the bends, hoping no truck was coming the other way.  Hah!  We nearly swapped mirrors several times.

 

Our goal tonite was Tygart State Park near Grafton, W.Va, which sits on a lake.  We had navigation instructions from the AAA Camping Guide, but chose unwisely this time to trust the GPS.  It seemed she was taking us in the right general direction, but when we got there we were at the other end of the lake and park where there was not the advertised facilities.  Instead, we were in what appeared to be a small, abandoned campground with not a soul in sight.  After fighting the narrow road all day, I didn’t want to try to take what looked like a very long, meandering road to the other end of the lake.  We decided to just stay put.  I took a nap while Loni made dinner.  It was eerily quiet, not even any birds.  Around dusk, I heard an engine and we watched a battered old heap cruise v-e-r-y slowly by and disappear around the bend.  We didn’t hear another sound all night.  Guess no axe murderers.

The next morning, we abandoned our “purist” routing and headed to Grafton over even worse roads, aiming to pick up I-68 to take us the rest of the way into Maryland.  Good call.  The Alleghany Mountains are a series of ridges, all of which lay vaguely perpendicular to our direction of travel.  Some of the cuts are spectacular displays of upfaults.

We would have spent eons crossing them on back roads.  The East is full of unpronounceable Indian names.  Give me good old Spanish place-names, thank you.

We made good time on 68, and realized we could make it all the way to our D.C. campground, but a day early for our reservations.  A call to the park, and they were happy to move us up a day.  First, we had to stop for gas, and a bit of serendipity came our way.

I want it!  What a great tow car for behind the rig.  I’ve had a thing for Deux Chevaux ever since our time in France back in college.  This one was in beautiful shape, although the owner had a bit of a problem getting it restarted.  We hit the outskirts of D.C. about 3 pm and, like L.A., the traffic already was building.  Of course, it was a Friday afternoon, gorgeous weather, so everyone was getting an early start. 

We crawled for ages until we reached the turnoff for the Cherry Hill RV Park, located in the College Park area NE of D.C., just north of the beltway.  Pricey – $935 for 16 days ($58 and change per day) – but there’s not a lot of options in the area.  It has just about all the amenities one could want, except for a wifi that will actually reach the rig.  We were right between two transmitters and still could not get a firm signal.  I ended up having to go up to the store and sit on the porch to cruise the web.  On this, our arrival day, I was on my way there to complain about it when a passing bird blessed me smack on the top of my head.  Was this to be an omen?   Our home for the next two weeks.

SO, WHERE WAS I?

It’s been more than a while since I last posted to the Blog.  We were in Niagara Falls with Mom, just finishing our bus tour of Canada, and ready to head east in the rig for our stay in D.C.  Yikes.  That was last May.  It’s now February as I write this.  No reason for the layoff other than sheer laziness.  The problem now is that, while I have photos of the rest of that trip, the daily events have mostly faded from memory.  Of course, these days, I don’t have to wait eight months for that to happen.  I’ll have to rely on a sketchy journal that Loni kept, and whatever jogs the memory from the photos.

May 15, 2012.  Leaving Mom in Indy, we set off at 9:15 to visit Loni’s cousin Marion in Union, Kentucky, which is just over the border from southern Indiana.  It was an uneventful drive down there, although the GPS, in bypassing Cincinnati, guided us over some pretty narrow roads on the way to her door.  She has a lovely home, with a ginormous finished basement (really, you could hold community meetings down there), and a greenbelt view out the back.  Loni and Marion hadn’t seen each other in many years, so a lot of catching up to do.  She set out a dinner-sized scrumptious lunch where we were joined by her son, Don, and his wife Pam.  We were stuffed to the gills (cheesecakes for dessert!), and wouldn’t need more than soup for dinner.

We had to apologize for “eating and running,” but we needed to head back north towards Dayton and our time travel through the age of flight.  We stopped overnight at the Frontier Campground in Waynesville, OH, so we could be poised to hit Dayton as soon as the museums opened.

Dayton was the location of the Wright Brothers bicycle business where they began their astounding pursuit of a flying machine.  Dayton is also home to the U.S. Air Force National Museum, where we could review pretty much all the aviation era post-Wright to the present.  This turned out to be a great double play.

We hit the Wright Brothers first.  Their shop, which actually was their fourth location in town, stands on it original location in the West end of town.  Next door is the museum devoted to their flight exploits.  I have to say, it was pretty neat to be standing in the shop where the brothers actually worked 100 years ago.  No photos were permitted inside.  There’s not a whole lot to see there, but that connection with the past was strong.  They’ve either left the originals, or have repaved the streets outside, with cobblestones, giving the area an old-timey feel.

The neighboring museum only allowed photos in a couple of restricted areas, so can’t show much there.  It was well worth the visit, though. 

These guys were both geniuses and stubborn, dogged, driven men.  Their lab books are filled with complex math calculations.  They didn’t go to college (heck, they didn’t graduate from high school), so how did they learn this stuff?  They found, by trial and error, that the accepted math (French, I believe) of the day on lift was all wrong, so they painstakingly observed, recorded, and rewrote the entire subject.  They even built their own wind tunnel to conduct experiments.  The original is on display at the AF Museum, see below.  You come away in awe and wonder that two guys from the sticks, through their own brilliance and determination, launched the foundations of aeronautics.  In addition to being bicycle mechanics, they also spent years as printers, with equipment they used again on display.

After an hour or so, we decamped for the Air Force Museum on the outskirts of town. 

The place is huge and I have dozens of photos of neat planes and artifacts.  I can only provide a taste here, but we had a great time.  We just missed the last two seats on the 11:30 tour of the presidential planes.  The next one, at 1:30, competed with a museum tour we also wanted to take.  Much fuming on my part while Loni waited patiently.  We opted for the 1:30 presidential one, and toured the rest of the museum on our own.  The displays were very nicely documented, so I don’t think we missed any pertinent details, but probably there were some guide stories that we didn’t get.  We saw Eisenhower’s plane, Kennedy-Johnson’s AF1, Roosevelt-Truman’s “Sacred Cow,” and others.

In the collage below, Sacred Cow is upper left, at lower left Eisenhower’s beautiful Constellation, “Columbine,” is the silver job in the back, and the mugging Nixonette is in front of AF1 (SAM 2600).

They had the original of the Wright Brothers’ wooden (!) wind tunnel on display:

There were tons of craft on display, so I’ll just show a few of them.

Oh, yeah.  Food report.  Not much to say.

At 3:30 we had to be on our way to Columbus to meet Loni’s roommate from her freshman dorm, Janie.  Janie left Stanford after her first year to come back to the Midwest where she graduated summa cum laud from the University of Ohio; the two hadn’t seen each other or even talked in over 40 years.  Janie recently had contacted the alumni association to see about reconnecting, and so here we are.  We thought we had left plenty of time for the 75 mile trip, but . . . First, Loni (ahem) misread the map, and we missed our freeway onramp out of Dayton – twice!  Then, about 1/2 mile from the exit we needed in Columbus, the traffic came to a standstill.  Worse than L.A.!  It took us nearly an hour to get from there to the Alum Creek State Park where we were to hole up for the night.  Some days you just should stay in bed.

But, the day ended on a good note.  Janie drove out to the park, picked us up, and we had a lovely dinner at the Bravo Restaurant.  The two girls talked nonstop as if they had just said goodbye yesterday.  No awkward silences.  Heck, no silences at all!  Loni says she learned a lot from Janie that first year:  how to dance, how to dress, how to land me.  I made that last up.  Now the two of them are on the lookout for their third roommate, Katie.