Our wonderful ship journey was over. The Maasdam docked in Boston early Saturday morning. We were packed and ready to go by 7:30. Customs was no problem as the masses exited the boat. In truth, we had already been properly vetted on the ship before we were ferried into Bar Harbor the previous day. We handed our declaration form to the Customs folks who, without even glancing at its contents, waved us on through. We found a taxi outside the cruise terminal and headed for Boston's South Station. We had first-class tickets on the Acela Express, Amtrak's high-speed flagship train on the northeast corridor. Our destination was Washington, D.C., where we would spend the night and visit several of the Smithsonian museums the next day before heading back to Atlanta Sunday night in a sleeper on Amtrak's Crescent.
The Acela Express trip was fun. We were glad we opted for first-class seats. The train made fewer stops than normal and hit speeds well in excess of other passenger trains. Patty downloaded an Amtrak app to her kindle and was able to follow our route and speed. At one point her kindle speedometer hit 124, although there were other times she wasn't monitoring the speed that we may have gone even faster. It was a relatively smooth ride, and we were served a great hot lunch and drinks whenever we requested them. We arrived in D.C. around 6:30 that afternoon, having left Boston at 11 a.m. Our hotel, the Phoenix Park, was only a block away. We rode shanks' mare with our bags to the hotel, checked in, then headed to the outside patio of the hotel restaurant, The Dubliner Irish Pub & Restaurant, for some nourishment (we also ate breakfast there the next morning). By the time we finished, we were ready to head back to the room to plan out the next day's activities.
Here are some pictures I took on this leg of our trip.
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Washington's Union Station was opened in 1907 and renovated in 1988. Grand Central in New York is the gold standard, but this station is still very impressive.
We deposited our luggage next morning in the Amtrak Express waiting room at Union Station, then headed for the mall. Our first stop was the National Air & Space Museum. It was crowded, which we expected as this is one of the most popular museums on the mall. Some really nice exhibits, especially for the space program, which was especially interesting to Patty as she grew up in the 50s and 60s on the space coast in the shadow of Cape Canaveral. Here are a few of the pictures I took.
Chuck Yeager was the first to break the sound barrier in level flight in this Bell X-1, nicknamed Glamorous Glennis after his wife.
Absolutely iconic. The DC-3 appears in every movie of the 30s and 40s where someone is flying somewhere. Many of them are still flying in many places around the world.
After making our way through the entire Air & Space Museum, we headed for their food court. It was extremely crowded, with lots of kids in very long lines, and the menu was all fast food. So, we headed across the mall to the National Gallery of Art, which we wanted to visit in any case. They had a wonderful uncrowded cafeteria where we had a really nice relaxing lunch far from the food-court madhouse of the Air & Space Museum.
