(no subject)

I wrote this on the Amtrak, mostly sitting in the second floor lounge and looking out the windows on a dark landscape rolling by into the night this past Friday. There is much squeeing about trains, buildings, and other things.

( ============Entry in here============ )

(no subject)

And then I wrote this one. I still couldn't post it because I couldn't get my computer onto a wireless network at any of our stations long enough to post anything. I can't connect through my phone anymore; something is taking up all the virtual com ports. I think I know what it is, but I don't know how to get rid of it. I'll figure it out at some point. Or I'll rebuild the laptop.

Anyway, ( another entry about traveling by train wherein I squee over stupid things. )

By the way; we finlly pulled into Union Station in Washington about five and a half hours behind schedule. I still had an awesome time on the train.

(no subject)

I have had a fantastic day and a half here with ankhorite and savant_da_rat. I finally got to their house, like, sevenish? There was a holiday party already underway (they'd been waiting hours for me to eat until they finally gave up, poor folks!), and I got to meet lots of neat people and talk into the night.

This morning, we were up early, and Savant and I decided to check out the nearby Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center, which is a sort of extension of the National Air and Space Museum. It was a very difficult building to get good shots in, especially without any previous familiarity with the place. There are airplane fuselages everywhere! On the floor, hanging from the ceiling, over and under each other. A handy map showing the location of the various planes through the building almost looked like someone had just taken a huge handful of plane silhouettes and flung them all onto the map of the building at random. But I went through a few hundred exposures and even got some good ones.

We checked out the huge hangar-like building where most of the planes were kept, went up into the mock-up control tower and looked out over the surrounding terrain from seven floors up. We were near enough to Dulles International to see planes coming landing and taking off, though it didn't seem to be all that busy. On the floor below is a live radar feed on a vectored graphics control station, with a radio feed of traffic from the Dulles tower to nearby pilots. Neat stuff! And there is a section with space vehicles and hardware, including Enterprise, the full-size test flight test model of the space shuttle, used in flight testing.

I'll have a bunch of pictures to post from the center as I get to them. I'll have to find the gems among the dozens and dozens clogged with too many other planes, or fuzziness, or low light. But I want to share this one with you now. It's not the best picture of this craft, or really that great a picture in general, but it's one I made. And seeing this plane in person was a powerful enough experience for me that I want to try to share it in some way.



Enola Gay at the National Air and Space Museum


As Ankhorite said, this is probably the second most important plane ever flown by humankind, after the Wright Brothers' Wright Flyer. Even with the multitude of other vehicles and artifacts in the building, seeing this plane, knowing that this is no model or replica, but the real thing...it inspired a complexity of emotions and thoughts that I don't really know how to express.

===============

I need to get to bed here. I'm going to sleep in a little bit in the morning ('till eight) since I haven't had much sleep in a few days, but I don't want to miss out on too much time photographing. But I want to thank Savant and Ankh again for their hospitality, and a fantastic trip so far.