The Eye of Kris

I had a pretty good trip to DC this week. The training was very good, the hotel was nice, we had some pretty good food, and of course you saw the pictures of the monuments at night - very cool.

The photos were actually somewhat difficult to get. Since it was so dark, the exposure times were long (3 to 6 seconds), so I couldn't hold the camera for most of the shots. I didn't have a tripod (didn't want to drag one around), so I mostly set the camera down on a ledge or on the ground and set the timer so that I wouldn't vibrate the camera even by pushing the button. A co-woker who was with me was very patient as I laid on the ground adjusting the camera and proping it with the lens cap, etc., trying to get each shot just right.

We saw a large convoy of vehicles leave the White House, but there's no way to know who was in it. Just witnessing all the security and infrastructure of that place is pretty awesome, though. We walked about 5 miles or so around the National Mall area before getting a taxi driver to take us somewhere good to eat. By the time we got back to our hotels, we were pretty tired.

And yes, Friday was my 30th birthday. We got out of class early, so my co-worker and I went to the National Air & Space Museum Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center. It's basically a gigantic hangar with hundreds of airplanes, rockets, and spacecraft, including the Concord, the SR-71 Blackbird (the fastest jet in the world), the Space Shuttle Enterprise, and a number of experimental planes.

After that, though, it got pretty dull. As previously mentioned, the only flight to Nashville was at 10:00 PM, so we ended up sitting at the airport for several hours, and I watched a movie on my laptop. Our flight was actually a little late, so I didn't get home until close to midnight. The flight was pretty bumpy, too, because we flew over/through a cold front, and it was much colder when we landed than it was when we left.