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We were approaching Washington, along the way there were lands with the headquarters of NASA, NSA, army, war museum,... we left the highway to enter the city by national roads.
We got lost and ended up having to go around the middle and a village. In doing so for a car, and asks us if we know the person who lives in that house. We deny. Then he asks us what we were doing there, we say we're lost and we're just turning around. She looks at us suspiciously and goes to the other house, where she calls the neighbors to come and see who we were. In the meantime we started and noticed that the whole village has a program in which all people are vigilant. For the first time we didn't feel very welcome.
We arrived in the city 3 hours later than initially predicted by the GPS: traffic, traffic and traffic, from Baltimore.
Around here we wanted to see only the white house, the capitol and the smithsonian museum. Outside the city center we see a mixture of cultures. Recently named the second coolest city in the USA to live in, by Forbes, it was when we arrived in the center that we felt like we were in the capital of the empire. A bit like Rome, here everything is huge, clean and majestic.
The monuments are easy to recognize and visiting the city is very pleasant. The mall, is a large national park that houses the flying areas, is 3 kms by 2, and the government and tribute buildings are all around it. We start with the capitol, and on the other side the obelisk. In between fountains, garden and statues. We went to the white house, we intended to say to Trump “it might be America First, but please Portugal 2nd”, we didn't see him. We went to the Lincoln memorial and passed the Vietnam War Veterans Memorial.
The visit to the Smithsoniac Museum followed and we were stunned. The museum is really amazing, worth a visit. It tells the story of aviation from its beginnings to space travel. We were separated, because Duna didn't stay in the car and we didn't stay long, but each of us took more than an hour.
In this central area of Washington, we felt calm, we saw police everywhere, but it was enough to walk a little to have contact with another reality. Many homeless. Along the way, we saw police cars in strategic areas. We stopped to sleep at a campsite and the next day we headed to Asheville, North Carolina for a very special conversation.
all photos with Fujifilm xt-2
