Metro station roof

Just returned from a week-long vacation to visit the folks, who live in Virginia just south of Washington, D.C. It’s a great place to visit, especially since the territory is so different from Montana. Your sense of navigation gets messed up—roads go in all directions through endless housing tracts carved out of deciduous forest, and you never have any sense of where you are. The sort of “take a right at Eddie’s Corner” instructions we use out here have no meaning in the east. But it’s great to soak up the big-city atmosphere once in a while, riding the Metro and gawking at tall buildings.

It’s fun, too, to recharge the cultural batteries. We hit the museums hard, catching the current Robert Rauschenberg exhibit at the National Gallery and saw the National Museum of the American Indian for the first time. Probably the high point for me was the new Air and Space Annex, which is interesting for everyone and an absolute toy store for aviation buffs:

P-40 and Corsair, Air and Space Annex

Everywhere you turn is a bit of aviation history: here’s the Concorde, there’s an SR-71, and oh, let’s throw in a space shuttle for good measure. Amazing.

Good food, too. Seafood’s always a gamble here in the backwoods, but on the coast you almost can’t find a bad meal. We enjoyed a great dinner at a place overlooking the Potomac one night, and tried sushi nearly everywhere it was sold. Even had some good Southern food at a mom-and-pop diner run by a former Marine and his family:

In the South, gravy is a food group.

One final treat was seeing the WWII memorial. It’s impressive, even though the wind was freezing and the memorial’s reflecting pool was drained for the winter. It must have been a tough design challenge to incorporate so many themes and points of view into a site that had to mesh harmoniously with views of the Washington Monument and Lincoln Memorial. I’d say they did a fine job, even if it lacks the emotional impact of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. There’s probably no monument that’s adequate to contain so much history. But the day we were there, the wind helped bring the best part of the memorial to life:

If you’ve never been to the nation’s capital, you need to go. Room and board might set you back a few bucks, but the best sights in town won’t cost you a dime. They’ve already been paid for.