NASM  Washington, D.C.  15 May 2005

After our fantastic stay at NAS Oceana the last five days we drove towards Washington D.C. to visit the National Air & Space Museum. Unfortunately it was again very busy on the I-95 so we arrived around 4.30 o'clock. This means we only had one hour to visit the museum.

Mark walked this own tour through the museum, as his main goal was the Concorde. Maurice and I walked together through the museum and tried to take some shots of the aircraft preserved here.

One of the highlights in the museum is of course the OV-101 Enterprise. This Space Shuttle is the first every build and was used as test bed on top of the NASA Boeing 747. This Shuttle however never made it into space. Other highlights for me were the SR-71, and the "Enola Gay". This part of the museum (called Udvar Hagy) is located near Dulles IAP, the other part is located in the centre of D.C. Unfortunately we didn't have time to visit that one as well.

Washington, D.C.  15 May 2005

After visiting the National Air & Space Museum we decided to visit some cultural sightings. So we drove towards the Arlington National Cemetery. It was a very impressive sight to see these thousands graves. Inside the cemetery we visited the grave of John F. Kennedy and his wife. The grave of Robert Kennedy and the grave of the Unknown Soldier.

From the Arlington National Cemetery we drove to downtown Washington D.C. to park the car near the Washington Monument. From here we were able to take some pictures of the Thomas Jefferson Memorial. When we came back to our car later in the evening we again took some picture of the Memorial by night. Unfortunately they was some work in progress around the Washington Monument so it was not possible to come close to it. However we were able to take some pictures of it from various places.

Close to the Washington Monument you'll find the National World War II Memorial. Here we just made a short stop to take some pictures on our way to the White House. From here you can also see the Lincoln Memorial. From the National World War II Memorial it was only a 5 minutes walk to the White House. Here we stayed for more than an hour and waited till the sun was set. As you can see below I took some pictures by day and during the night. After we left the White House we walked back to our car. With our car we drove along the National Mall and made a short stop to take a picture of the United Stated Capitol. There was a lot of activity around the capitol and the police was acting very strange so we decided to stay not to long here.

NAS Patuxent River, MD  16 May 2005

From Washington D.C. we drove back to NAS Patuxent River, MD to stay for the night. Unfortunately it was not possible to stay in a room on base so we booked a room close to the main gate. The next morning we were lucky to enter the base again and 10 minutes later we wrote our first numbers down. A lot of cool stuff was parked on several ramp throughout the base but it was not possible to take any pictures of them. This was sometimes very hard, but we didn't want any trouble so we really didn't take any. After a visit of about two hours we saw more than 75 aircraft of VX-1, VX-20, VX-23 and US NTPS.

After we left NAS Patuxent River we drove to Dulles IAP to bring back our car and took of around 5.20 hours in the afternoon. The next day after a 7,5 hours flight we landed at Amsterdam-Schiphol Airport and came an end to our USA East Coast Tour.