Washington, DC & The Great Smoky Mountains–Day 4-Udvar-Hazy National Air and Space Museum

After our full day of sightseeing on Tuesday, we got off to a bit of a slower start on Wednesday. Before we headed out, Jonathan noticed something was wrong with one of our tires. We decided to take care of it when we got back from our morning at the museum since we didn’t have anything planned for the afternoon.

We arrived at the Udvar-Hazy shortly after it opened.

Ben was very excited about this museum, too. One of the first planes he saw looked just like Skipper, from Disney’s Planes.

The main reason we wanted to visit the Udvar-Hazy was to see the Discovery. We saw Atlantis earlier in the year at KSC.

The Udvar-Hazy has an area dedicated to restoration, but Discovery was kept in its original condition, showing all the work that it did over the years and on its many trips in orbit.

We did a walking tour with one of the docents. It was really very interesting, at least for me and Jonathan. The kids made it most of the way through.

The kids and I ducked away from the tour and headed over to the kids story and craft time.

We saw a Concord.

The Enola Gay

Perhaps the biggest highlight, was seeing the SR-71 Blackbird. It’s literally “faster than a speeding bullet.”

Before heading out, we headed up the elevator to the observation tower.

The Udvar-Hazy is beside Dulles Airport, so we got to see a few planes land and take off.

Then we headed back to Jason and Nikki’s.

Once we got back, Jonathan dropped the kids and me off and went to have our tire taken care of. It ended up being both worse and better than we thought. Before we left on our trip, we’d had some work done on the van. As it turned out, the work hadn’t actually been done, and one of our tires had been worn clear through the tread to expose the metal. Thankfully, there was a sister-store in Virginia and all of the work was done and our tire was replaced at no charge. We were so thankful that we had been kept safe while driving so much over the past few days. It really could have been tragic.

With the car taken care of, we just needed to wash some laundry, visit some more with my brother and his family, then pack up to head on to our next stop.