One thing about living/working in the D.C. region, is that it generally lends itself to the giant  pain and stress of ridiculous amounts of traffic and congestion on a regular basis… Oh there’s a protest today, that’ll be an extra 2 hours to get into work and get home. Oh there’s some kind of small unheard of holiday today, that’s 3 hours you’ll spend in your car pondering how much quicker it would be to walk. Oh it’s Thursday and people woke up today… yeah that’s an extra 5 hours.

Obviously being in this region means there’s always stuff going on, and sadly whether its important or not, the slightest thing seems to bring all travel to a standstill (we attempted to go to the ‘Rally to Restore Sanity’ not only did using the Metro take almost 2 hours longer than normal, but another 3 extra hours on the way back home).

Today was one of those amazing reminders that its not always bad.

Yeah, that picture was taken from the parking lot of my office today without any fancy zoom lenses. The space shuttle Discovery made its way from Florida to Dulles Airport, which is maybe 600 yards from where I work, so it can take its place at its new home, the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum (the Udvar Hazy Center, the one with all the full size planes including the SR-71 etc., not the one in downtown D.C.). That meant me and thousands (millions?) of others got to see a space shuttle strapped to the top of a special 747 do repeated loops around the city, showing off, escorted by fighter Hornets. And it wasn’t a ‘need zoom lens or binoculars’ to see it kind of thing. They flew it in the 700-1500 ft. above ground range. You felt like it was within reach, and it was above your parking lot.this wasn’t like watching it on CNN (who were off by about 56 minutes telling us when this thing was landing), so I totally get when people say how awe inspiring it is to see a shuttle take off for space.

Its totally sad that the shuttering down of the space program is why this was happening. I really hope this isn’t the last opportunity in my lifetime to see a live space craft in flight, but nonetheless, even with the extra 2 hours of traffic this caused today, the awesomeness made it totally worth it.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 17th, 2012 at 10:24 pm and is filed under D.C., Events-Entertainment etc., Virginia.
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