So guess what city Nick and I visited back in ... ahem ... May? Nick had a conference to attend in Leesburg, Virginia, so the two of us made a week of it. The trip was incredibly fun, although the whole experience of driving in the DC area left a great deal to be desired. It was bad, man. Really, really bad. I took the rental car to one of the outreaching metro stops while Nick was attending workshops, and it was pretty much the definition of a nightmare. First of all, it took me an hour just to get to the metro station. Apparently, in this part of the country, twenty miles away = at least an hour's drive. Next, I drove around this massive complex for another hour, going from parking area to parking area, and there was NOT A SINGLE PARKING PLACE TO BE FOUND. On my second run-through, just before giving up, I saw this man walking to his car and stalked him dangerously until he pulled out in his car and I was able to snag his space. Whew. I was very lucky. Everything went swimmingly once I was actually on the metro, but once I returned to the station at the end of the day, the fun continued. Somehow, I managed to exit out the wrong side of the station. I walked around for an hour in the baking sun, trying in vain to find my car, before realizing that there was a whole other set of lots that branched off from the other side of the station. And then....oh yes, it gets better...I sat in traffic for AN HOUR AND FORTY-FIVE MINUTES just to make it those scant twenty miles back to Leesburg. Words cannot express the frustration of this. Just sitting there, bumper to bumper, moving perhaps an inch every few minutes. But there was nothing to do about it, so I just popped in the Creedence and tried to lower my blood pressure stereophonically. How do people do this commute thing every single day? I cannot even imagine the sheer hell this must be.

Fortunately, the next day Nick and I found a metered lot, made a trip by a very cooperative bank, dumped $7.00 worth of quarters into the meter, and had a very pleasant ride into DC. And since there were two of us, on the way home I just pulled out my iPhone and mapped an alternate route for us so that we could avoid the snarl. It was actually quite lovely going the backroads of Virginia. We saw palatial houses, Civil War era homes, and a few huge, lush greens where people in jodhpurs were training horses. Sometimes heading off the main roads is the best possible thing you can do while traveling.

I spent two days on my own--one in DC, one at the Smithsonian Air & Space Museum Annex just outside of Leesburg--and then Nick and I spent a few more days exploring the city together. Here is a not-so-brief sampling of the stuff we saw. I'll try to keep the explanations short so as not to try everyone's patience, since there are a LOT of photos here.

The first place I went to see on my own was the National Gallery of Art. It's an extremely impressive museum, filled with many of the most famous pieces of art in the world. It's also very welcoming to people who wish to come in with paints and a palette and do their own renderings of the art, as the gentleman above is doing. His portrait is quite faithful, although I have to say it looks a tad more like Bob Dylan than the original.

"Sacre bleu! An army marches on its stomach!"

This is the atrium of the beautifully designed Holocaust Museum in DC. There was very little else that was beautiful within, although it was very, very well done. Incredibly informative and presented in such an educational way that you can almost endure the soul-crushing horror of it all. Almost.

Here is the White House! On a rainy day! From a great distance but captured through a rather impressive zoom! Needless to say, we did not see the president, although it did look like there was some kind of press conference taking place right when we arrived. Impressive building.

And speaking of impressive, this is the World War II memorial.

I felt compelled to take this photo since my grandfather on my mom's side fought in Okinawa. It was one of the deadliest battle zones in the war.

The Korean War Memorial. Isn't the design of this gorgeous? I love how it incorporates the greenery to give a sense of the soldiers' environment.

Lincoln!!! Much, much bigger in person. I can see why those people were so impressed with it at the end of Logan's Run.

And this is the famous reflecting pool, undergoing some seriously unattractive renovation. Sigh. No re-enacting the Jenny scene from Forrest Gump for us.

This is in the Air and Space Museum. It's the actual Spirit of St. Louis.

One of Amelia Earhart's jackets! How cool is that?

Here's the exterior of the Air & Space Museum annex, just outside of Leesburg.

The Enola Gay. Like Lincoln's statue, this was much, much larger than I would have imagined.

Here's a German Messerschmitt, which looks as if it's seen a bit of battle.

And this is the type of plane flown by the kamikaze pilots.

There was a whole wall of engines in this museum, and some of them were downright gorgeous. This one looks kind of organic, like a deep sea creature or something.

This was the model alien craft used in the filming of Close Encounters of the Third Kind.

And here you will notice that the creators of the model embellished the surface with some recognizable characters (since they were too small to show up in the finished film). See R2-D2 right in the center there?

Ford's Theater. See the old-fashioned lampposts still in use?

Here's our lovely hotel in Leesburg. Would you ever guess it was a Holiday Inn? By the way, the hotel restaurant served primarily Indian food, and the rogan josh was so unbelievably delicious it nearly made me cry. For reals. Probably the best Indian food I've ever had.

Oh! And last, but not least, here's the famous Dulles airport, where large parts of the immortal Die Hard 2 were filmed. Yippee kai-yay....uh....melon farmer?