Day 21: Tysons Corner VA

Apologies for not posting yesterday - Mike and I actually managed to find a babysitter (correction, find someone who'd find us a babysitter - thanks, Kim!) and head out for date night. Or work, as it's sometimes called.

A low-key day had taken us to the Stephen F Udvar-Hazy Center of the Air and Space Museum. Fundamentally, this is an enormous maze of hangars filled with boys toys. There weren't many women there, to be honest - and all that had made the trip had small boys with them. Or bearded men.

That's not to say I don't enjoy looking at aeroplanes and a space shuttle. They're very beautiful pieces of machinery, and man's inventiveness is a constant wonder. But it's disturbing to be gazing absently at a beautiful silver classical plane and suddenly realise that it's the Enola Gay - the B-29 that dropped the bomb on Hiroshima. It seems to be in the wrong museum - surrounded by prototypes and privately-owned craft, this isn't a plane, it's a moment of history. I don't want to hear its story from a pilot; I don't want to hear it from an aircraft enthusiast. I especially don't want to admire it out of context. The plane's unsullied gleam and classic proportions are of course a reminder that acts are committed by people, not by the machines they create. But despite that, venerating and protecting this particular craft seems to me desperately inappropriate.

Today's statistics:

• Operas seen: 2 (if you count Pyramus & Thisbe)
• Swims: 1
• World War II initiation conversations with William: 2 (Hiroshima and kamikaze pilots. We did the holocaust last week.)
• Friends caught up with: several
  
• Breakfast: Hilton hotel, Tysons Corner
• Lunch: Macdonalds, Air and Space Museum
• Dinner: Cheesecake Factory leftovers in the hotel room / Wolf Trap bar

Today's Discoveries:

• We were building airplanes that could fly at 3 times the speed of sound fifty years ago.
• It seems fairly dubious (or at least very convenient) that the bombadier actually got a visual on Nagasaki.
• The Space Shuttle Enterprise was originally called the Constitution (after the ship we visited in Boston) before Trekkies got involved.
  
• Concorde's windows were that small to save money - the engineers worked them out to be small enought that, if they blew out, the pressure loss would be slow enough for the pilot to reduce his altitude sufficiently, so they didn't need oxygen masks and canisters.