I've moved on to the capital - Washington DC - where, it appears, I will spend the next three days feasting on a multitude of iconic erections. Washington is awash with monuments to Presidents and wars, and there are more museums and galleries here than I know what to do with, frankly. I pick out six to visit - a mere six - over the three days, which is probably still an unhealthy amount. New levels of discipline will be required if I am to see everything I want to. Must remember to eat.
Where DC trumps the majority of the rest of the US is in the fact that everything is free to visit so, by massively overdosing here, I'll have hopefully satisfied my recent addiction and will be free to carry along the road south and west without needing to keep paying twenty dollars to stop, stand and look at stuff every other day.
I'm in monument overdrive my first day, things being just about walkable from the hostel. My time here is going to be full-on tourism. No pussyfooting. White House, Washington monument, Lincoln Memorial, Arlington Cemetary, JFK gravesite, Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, Marine Corps Memorial (the Iwo Jima flag one), Roosevelt Memorial, Jefferson Memorial. Capitol. Bosh.
Add on a couple of cheeky art museums and that is one day done...Warhol's Shadows all in one place for the first time (83 'identical' screenprints of a shadow in his office, except each is finished and coloured differently), arranged side-by-side in a circular gallery. Striking.
The thing with me and DC is, I have been here before, albeit a faux-1950's futuristic vision of here. But everything is where I expect it to be, I know my way around, even down to corridors and doorways underneath monuments! For the uninitiated, there is a console game called Fallout 3, where you grow up in a nuclear shelter just outside DC. It is an incredible visual achievement, recreating a post-nuclear bombed city in amazing detail. Things have come a long way from the days of Chuckie Egg.
Next day I take on the Smithsonian Natural History and one half (the classical half) of the monumental National Gallery of Art - it's so big it comprises two buildings connected by a subway under a road.
The Natural History is everything you would expect from such a place. I even brave standing four feet from the perspex front of the tarantula exhibit, and can see the tips of some of its' legs under a piece of bark. I take an extra step back and hold my hand across my mouth. Just in case.
I am writing now at the end of my third day of museum wanderings. And I am exhausted. I've been on my feet a lot the last three days. Today comprised the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum and the modern art half of the National Gallery of Art. I mainly neglected the 'air' portion of the Smithsonian and gave my full attention to the 'space'. For three hours and more.
Reports on the news sites today suggest a couple of supermassive black holes have been discovered, 10 billion times the mass of our own sun. Consider the diameter of our sun can fit all the planets in our solar system across, side-by-side, three times, and still have room for an extra Saturn, an extra Pluto and four extra Earths, then 10 billion times the mass of the sun is pretty unimaginably big!
I get to see a version of the Hubble telescope - partly responsible for such discoveries - along with some of the extraordinary shots the actual thing has managed to produce. There are some mind-blowing things out there, people. Universe-sized formations of swirling gases, giving birth to stars, which eventually die and become infinitesimally smaller than this full stop. We are beyond insignificance.
Over the road now, and it has gotten to the point where I can walk into a room of late 19th and early 20th Century European masters, and tell the artists without looking at the plaques, so many examples have I seen as I have passed through the galleries of the American Northeast. Gauguin, Cezanne, Manet, Monet, Seurat, van Gogh, Picasso, Degas, Miro, Rousseau...Renoir and Toulouse-Lautrec continue to keep me on my toes though.
One last thing before I get on my way again...we have dipped our toes into the month of December already, and I have a little over a month left in the USA. Not a great deal of time considering I'm on the opposite side of the country from where I need to be in the second week of January. I've therefore spent the last couple of evenings planning out most of my route back over towards the west coast, and making sure I have places enough to park up at night to sleep.
I've a few landmarks put by on my route, which I'll tell you about as I go. In the meantime, enjoy your run-ups to the 25th, and all the frivolity that that generally brings.
Oh, and Barack says hi.
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