Headed for warmer climes

We departed DC this morning and are downbound in the Potomac River, against a knot of incoming tide, just approaching Quantico as I start typing. In all, we were in the District just over a month, spending all of October and a day on either end. Other than a single night, we spent that entire time at anchor and put 96 hours on the generator.


Vector at sunset in the Washington Channel. Seen from the roof of our friends' apartment building.

It was yet a few days after my last post before Louise was able to narrow down a return date. In the meantime, I continued to enjoy the charms of the District, albeit with a bit of a chilly tender ride back and forth from the boat.

Having already covered most of the museums along the Mall, I decided to head toward Chinatown and visit the National Portrait Gallery, colocated with the Smithsonian American Art Museum. As I mentioned in my last post, often the buildings interest me as much as the contents, and this was no exception.


"Preamble" at the Smithsonian American Art Museum.

I started out with lunch from one of the food trucks now ubiquitous throughout DC, dining right on the gallery steps. That was a much better deal than the lovely courtyard cafe in the museum, in a corner of the vast atrium, once an outdoor courtyard but now a dramatic inside space, complete with walk-through fountains.

I did enjoy both the Portrait Gallery and the American Art Museum, but I more enjoyed strolling the vast spaces. The building once was the United States Patent Office, and is quite rich in history, being one of the earliest federal buildings in the District. Clara Barton once worked here, and Lincoln had his second inaugural ball here. Multi-story stacks which once housed scale models of every patent now hold collections of curated art and the museum's conservation department.


One of the upper galleries at The Old Patent Office.

I ended my day at the Law Enforcement Memorial and the brand new Law Enforcement Museum. The museum had literally just opened a few days earlier. Since I showed up at 5pm with a 6pm closing time, they let me in for a donation rather than the customary $23 charge, and at ten bucks it was just right. They still have a bit of work to do, and I was disappointed at the lack of any motor unit display.

At least one day and several mornings were lost to allergies. When the wind shifted around to the north it brought some sort of allergen with it, as so often happens. On those mornings I tried to catch up on email, and I used one to sort through the lengthy ballot and cast my vote in the election.

Craving Italian food that was more homey and less artisanal, Yelp pointed me to a place past the Navy Yard that was an easy ride on one of the $1 "Circulator" buses. When I got off the bus I found myself on Barracks Row, complete with uniformed USMC sentry posted outside the actual Marine Barracks. This trendy district sports perhaps a dozen restaurants, and I enjoyed strolling before dinner. (We arrived too late in the season to catch the free Marine Corps Band performances at the barracks.)

After dinner I again boarded the Circulator, getting off at the Safeway for a few groceries. That's when I discovered my credit card missing, and, reasoning I had left it at the restaurant, called them only to learn it had not yet turned up. I bought my groceries and continued home; they called my at closing time to let me know they had it. The temperature dropped to 42 overnight, the coldest I had yet seen.

Fortunately, by this time, Louise had her relief lined up in California and was ready to book her flight home; I made the bookings for her using reward points. Tuesday the 23rd, a full three weeks after she left, into Reagan, with an arrival after dinner. That let us start thinking about a departure before the end of the month, headed out of this cold for warmer climes.

I've been needing a massage for quite some time, and there is really nothing in the Wharf area. A few downtown hotels, including the Omni just a few blocks from the Wharf, have high-end spas happy to sell massages in the $150-$200 range, but a "spa experience" was not what I wanted to pay for. I ended up booking a place out in Adams Morgan, near the zoo, which turned out to be mediocre. But while out there I wandered into the Marriott Wardman Park just to use the rest room, and happened to stumble into the Anime USA conference. That, at least, explained some of the outfits I had seen riding the Metro.

Of course, I had to end my day right back at Barracks Row to retrieve my credit card, and so I ended up sampling a couple of the other joints along the street. I'm a little sorry I had not discovered this neighborhood earlier.

On one of the more pleasant days I struck out just to walk around town, and ended up on the spur of the moment walking into the Newseum. At about the same price, this one was much better than the Law Enforcement museum, and I can highly recommend it. I should have gone in a bit earlier, as I ended up closing the place down. This is another place where the architecture was also of interest to me, and as a bonus, the rooftop terrace affords magnificent views from the Capitol all the way around to Federal Triangle.


The Capitol as seen from the terrace at the Newseum.

I made another pilgrimage to Georgetown, this time to drop off a return at the Amazon store. Amazon wanted $5 in shipping otherwise, and it only cost me $2 to go out there on the Circulator so I viewed it as a free trip. As long as I was out there I had a beer atop the Graham Hotel, with a lovely view over Georgetown and the river, and I got a kick out of meeting a brace of young attorneys visiting from Fort Lauderdale.

One of the consequences of Louise's extended absence is that I ran out of clean clothes. We do have full laundry facilities aboard, but they use so much water that we either need to be at a dock, or within a few days of one in order to use them. I spent an evening using the facilities at the yacht club, and having dinner at the Wharf while my dryer ran.

I'm not sure why it did not occur to me much earlier in the month, but I realized just before Louise returned that the Mexican Embassy was an easy walk, and just before she got back I headed over there to see if I could turn in the Temporary Importation Permit for the our former bus, Odyssey. Sadly, that turned out to be a service they can only perform at consulates closer to the border (including, of all places, Chicago). They were at least able to give me information about possibly handling it by mail with Mexico City.

From the Mexican Embassy it was an easy stroll to the Smithsonian's Renwick Gallery, where I took in the current exhibit, The Art of Burning Man. Being deeply connected to Burner culture and also to that part of the desert, the most interesting thing for me was to observe the reactions of the mostly local or northeastern visitors.

From there I made my way to Meridian Hill Park to see the cascading fountains, but they were closed and drained for the season. For that matter, almost every public fountain in DC has been empty since we arrived in September, and only a handful of private ones, such as those at the Wharf, have been operating. As we wrapped up our visit, several were in the process of conversion to ice skating for the winter.

My final day of bachelorhood was spent cleaning up the boat for Louise's return. That included stowing Mr. Roboto, the freestanding air conditioner in the stateroom, which unfortunately had accumulated some mold along with tons of dust in the filters. It also including stowing the inflatable kayak for the season, and loading and stowing the bicycle which I had been using ashore.

New friends Jay and Pam from the yacht club had invited me to play Bocce on the public court right across from Vector at 5, and after a few quick rounds they invited me up for a beer and a quick tour of their waterfront apartment. I enjoyed the sweeping views from the roof terrace as well. Sadly, I had to rush out in order to grab prescription cat food on my way to the airport.

The excursion to Petsmart meant I had to walk a half mile to the airport terminal from the bus stop in Crystal City. Airports are decidedly not designed to be entered on foot, and I followed a convoluted and circuitous route through various backstage parking areas before reaching the terminal. I had a few minutes to wolf down a salad before Louise made her way off the plane.

Our elation at her return was short-lived. By the end of the next day she was coming down with a full-blown cold and would soon be down for the count. We managed to drag ourselves to the bank mid-day for a scheduled appointment to have our signatures guaranteed, and that wiped her out. We did just manage to also get ashore for dinner, but were only up for the closest place right on the Wharf, Kirwans. By Thursday she could not even do that, and we waved off the nice dinner reservations I had made at the City Club, and I ended up fetching a pizza from the dockside stand at the Wharf.

In all, we lost three days or so to her cold. On the plus side, in that time the downward trend in temperature mitigated and we could see perhaps three nice days in DC on the horizon, and so we opted to extend our stay a bit. Fortunately I discovered there is a pumpout boat that services the anchorage (for free!) and after nearly four weeks we needed it.

The other hangup was laundry. And mold. In the depths of the cold I pulled my parka out of the coat closet to discover that most of our coats and especially the leather ones had a white growth on them, something in the mold or mildew family. Getting to a dock to address these two issues became paramount, and that was beckoning us to leave DC. We opted instead to just spend a night at the dock at the yacht club, who fortuitously had space available.

We weighed anchor Monday morning, bringing up tons of fishing gear and parts of Jimmy Hoffa's clothing. After fiddling around with snips clearing the ground tackle for 20 minutes, we finally cleared the anchorage and made it to the dock, where we immediately started taking on water and running laundry. It was one of the colder days and nights, so it was nice to have the power available as well.


Not a victim of mold, but rather just age, I tossed my cherished bal-laced Dehner motor patrol boots in the post-mold purge.

Louise did all the accumulated laundry on the boat, and I set to work wiping down all our leather coats and boots with a vinegar solution. Machine washable coats and linings made a trip through the washer. And we sprayed down the insides of the lockers with Concrobium, in the hopes that will keep it at bay. Other than an excursion for dinner we basically spent our entire dock day on the boat doing chores. We filled the water tank before dropping lines.

That at least let us breathe easier about spending another few nights in town, and we returned to the anchorage. Another boat snagged our spot so we ended up a few hundred feet south (map). We did not tell them about finding Jimmy Hoffa on the bottom there. I squeezed in one last museum stop, at the Smithsonian's Postal Museum in the historic old post office next to Union Station. This on my way to a final Walmart run, followed by picking up a gallon of gas for the tender at the closest gas station.

We did finally make it to the City Club for dinner, a belated birthday celebration for Louise. It's gone downhill since our last visit three years ago, which seems to be a trend among clubs now. We spent some time at, of all places, the mall at Pentagon City, to get some needed shopping done. And we spent the evening of Halloween in old town Alexandria, where we found one of the historic residential streets closed down so the children could trick-or-treat; it was very endearing.


Trick or treating in Alexandria. Even the residents wore costumes. I got a kick out of the little Buzz Lightyear.

For our very last evening in town, one of the warmest since Louise returned, we ventured to the top of the historic Post Office Tower, the third tallest building in DC (only the Washington Monument and the National Cathedral are taller) to take in the view, one of the Park Services hidden free gems in DC. The tower holds the Bells of Congress, and as it happens, the Washington Ringing Society practices ringing the bells every Thursday. We got to hear them on our way home later.


The view towards The Capitol from the Post Office Tower. FBI building at left.

Having started the evening with a birds-eye view, we continued the theme for cocktail hour by heading up to the P.O.V. lounge atop The W Hotel. This ultra-trendy joint will clean out your wallet if you have too many drinks, but the view is fantastic. While we were sitting on our bar stools overlooking the Treasury Building, we noticed that the Secret Service had closed off The Ellipse with a marked cruiser. A few minutes later the unmistakable sound of a Sea King helicopter explained why.

The view of the White House from this location is not great, unless watching armed guards patrol the roof is your thing. Nor can you directly see the South Lawn. But we had a clear view of the presidential white-top lifting off, turning, and heading south over Vector. It was either an empty return trip, or (less likely) a distinguished visitor, as the chopper was not immediately accompanied by two of its brethren in the usual flying shell game when the CinC is aboard. Still it was interesting to watch, and I made a short video.


"Marine One" taking off from the south lawn.

I might mention here, as I did three years ago, that anchored in the Washington Channel for any length of time, you will become intimate with an array of helicopters that buzz by just a few dozen yards overhead. The vast majority of these are unmistakable Hueys in VIP trim, but the Sea King and White Hawk presidential Marine choppers come in second, often flying over in threes. The occasional police or Coast Guard unit is an almost daily occurrence, and fully armed military Blackhawks round out the roster. The channel is the designated helicopter flyway; further west is Reagan controlled airspace, and further east is off limits to all aircraft.

We had a final dinner at The Occidental Grill in the Willard Hotel, another place we'll skip in the future. We dropped our keys off at the Yacht Club, and decked the tender as soon as we got home. Just as well, as the wind and chop picked up soon after. The fact that they are assembling the outdoor skating rink at the Wharf is a sure sign it was time to move on. Our last hurrah in DC, as it were, was to hear the crowd cheering for DC United at Audi Field, which was quite loud even from nearly a half mile away.


Not really Air Force One.

This morning's cruise brought us past National Harbor, where we spotted the latest tourist-fleecing attraction, a full-size replica of Air Force One. This had been brought upriver just a few days ahead of us on a barge (it's not airworthy), and they were still offloading when we passed in the other direction. It's basically a generic retired 747 that's been painted outside and mocked up, as best as they knew how, inside to look like the real Boeing VC-25 aircraft. Apparently the contractors that did the painting and interiors are still owed money and are threatening a lien.

The highlight of the morning was spotting a bald eagle atop a post on the pier outside the US Naval Research Laboratory. The eagle was unfazed by one of the aforementioned Hueys buzzing overhead just as I snapped my photos.


A bald eagle guards the pier of the Naval Research Laboratory.

Update: We are anchored in the Potomac, just across the river from where we anchored on our upbound trip (map). We had a favorable current for the last part of the day and continued until nearly 6pm to take advantage. It was dead calm when we anchored and through dinner, but a couple of hours later a huge thunderstorm moved through and we had a tornado warning. Our anemometer registered winds of 43mph and we had perhaps three footers here. The wind managed to drive some water in around some of our portlights and we had a mad scramble to mop up.

As I finish typing here around midnight the storms have passed, we had no tornado, and the river has once again calmed down. I expect we will make an early start tomorrow and end the day somewhere near the mouth of the river. Once we're on the Chesapeake we'll have higher water temperatures and slightly more temperate conditions.

Justitia Omnibus

When last I posted here, I said I would post again when I had some idea of Louise's return date. That was over two weeks ago, and, at this writing, she still has no return ticket nor a clear notion of when that might be. Two weeks is a long time between blog posts, and some folks have inquired as to our well-being, so I thought I should post an update.


The Capitol at night. I snapped this mid-Mall, about abreast of Air and Space.

Before I get into the more mundane, let me just say that yes, we are both well, as is Angel the cat, and the boat is also fine, if a bit more encrusted with marine growth. I am anchored in the Washington Channel (map), where we dropped the hook on our arrival. I now have two neighbors, a pair of sailboats a bit to my south.


Washington monument at dusk, as seen from the National Mall. Smithsonian Castle is on the left.

We arrived in the channel around 4pm, and cleared in with the harbor patrol as required. We were surprised to learn that the anchorage is now restricted to an area designated by four new yellow buoys just south of the police dock. We knew from reading cruising notes that anchoring north of that dock is no longer allowed, but these buoys are newer than even the most recent comments.

Fortunately the anchorage was completely empty when we arrived. The buoys delineate an area perhaps just under 200' wide by maybe 800' or so long. 200' is basically the diameter of our swing circle in this 15-20' depth area, so the anchorage now has room for three or at most four cruising boats. We chose a spot at the northernmost end, to minimize the wakes and our dinghy ride. That puts us immediately adjacent to the Titanic Memorial.


Vector next to the Titanic Memorial. Smokestack is on Fort McNair.

We splashed the tender right away and headed ashore. Capital Yacht Club dockmaster Kelvin met us on the dinghy dock with a pair of card keys and a folder of information. We would have immediately headed upstairs to the club bar for a beer, except it was closed for a private event that evening, so instead we crossed the street to Kirwan's pub, part of the enormous new District Wharf complex.

This dining, retail, entertainment, office, and residential mixed-use development has been open just a year. When last we were here it was basically a big hole in the ground, with workmen setting foundations while pumps extracted water from the whole shebang. The yacht club was working out of temporary quarters in an abandoned hotel, which will be removed shortly as part of phase two of the project.


Vector as seen from the Titanic Memorial. Wharf complex is at right, Washington Monument in background, and one of the ever-present construction cranes that dot the city.

After our beers we strolled around the complex for a while taking it all in. It was incredibly busy on a very pleasant weekend evening. Apparently the whole concept has been a resounding success; the place has remained busy and vibrant the whole two weeks I've been here. On the weekend there were musicians performing at various spots throughout the complex.

In short order we found there to be a CVS pharmacy, handy for milk and other last-minute items, a full-service hardware store, District Hardware, which quirkily sports a cafe and a bicycle sales and repair business within, a huge and popular music venue called Anthem, three upscale hotels, and perhaps a dozen bars and restaurants. I later learned there is also a marine supply store, Anchor, which also sells craft beers and nautical fashions.


The Washington Monument across the Tidal Basin, as seen from the Jefferson Memorial.

There are also quite a few public spaces, including the "recreation pier" where paddlecraft can be rented and which sports a gas-fired fire pit at the end as well as swings all along the pier, a more traditional wood fire pit shoreside, a number of outdoor stage areas, plenty of seating, and bicycle racks. There are transient docks for hourly visitors at $30 for three hours. and even overnight docks.

We ended up at the upscale pizza place, Lupo Marino, for a casual final dinner together. It was ok but we won't be going back. Lots of better choices right here at the wharf, and certainly less expensive options further afield. We made it home before the channel closure for the fireworks, which we could just see above the tour boats docked upriver of us.


Fireworks from The Wharf, their smoke veiling the Washington Monument.

In the morning we called a Lyft to get over to Reagan National Airport, which is close enough to the anchorage that we can read the tire expiration dates on arriving aircraft. We had hoped to catch breakfast together but there we no real good options ahead of security, so Louise continued on toward her gate, and I strolled through the historic older art-deco sections of the terminal before getting on the Metro to head home.

Only later did I learn that one of the services offered by The Wharf is a free shuttle bus to the L'Enfant Plaza Metro station, which would have made getting to the airport on the Metro a slam-dunk. I spent a little time wandering around L'Enfant plaza as well; I stayed in the hotel here as a youth and I was hoping it had been re-opened, but is has not. It has been closed since before our last visit three years ago.

After getting billing squared away with the club office, picking up a couple of packages including our accumulated mail (which had already made a round-trip to Port Washington, NY), and learning about the free shuttle, I returned to Vector to settle in to bachelorhood. At least until returning ashore at cocktail hour for my first of many beers at the club bar.


Gangplank marina, tour boat piers, and the Wasginton Channel as seen from the roof of the Hilton Canopy hotel at The Wharf. Vector is barely visible center frame past the tour boats.

My first couple of days I did some walking around the district and took in a couple of museums, notably the National Museum of African American History, which was not yet open on our last visit. I found it very moving, though not as much so as the Civil Rights Museum in Memphis.


The Washington Monument and surroundings as seen from inside the National Museum of African American History.

A side note here may be in order. Long-time readers may know that Louise, with few exceptions (such as the aforementioned Civil Rights Museum), does not do museums. That's because it is very, very hard on her chronic plantar fasciitis, a lifelong condition. Sometimes we'll breeze through a museum together quickly -- we had to miss Martin Luther King's room in Memphis, for example. Sometimes we'll rent or borrow a wheelchair. Mostly, if there is a museum I want to see, I do it alone.

The atrium of the National Museum of the American Indian. Prisms in a sunny window cast the rainbows.

And so it is that, with Louise away, I set a fairly ambitious (or so I thought) schedule of museum visits. I wanted to see the African American one, with an eye to whether or not we should come back together. Another newer museum that we missed last time is the National Museum of the American Indian, one we thought might be redundant for the numerous native American cultural sites we've visited in person. And it's been a very, very long time since I was in the National Galleries.


The rotunda of the National Gallery of Art (west building). An eighteenth century copy of a sixteenth century bronze, Giovanni Bologna's Flying Mercury, graces the fountain. I grew up with this statue; a nineteenth century copy is prominent in the lobby of The New York Athletic Club, where I studied fencing, among other sports, for years.

While the weather had been absolutely perfect and the museums were calling me loudly, an issue aboard Vector that had been growing ever more pressing in the last couple of weeks reached a nadir that diverted my attention for two full days. To wit, I had to replace the flooring in the saloon.

There is a very long story here which I will try to distill down to just a couple of paragraphs, that starts with a cat with but one kidney. Readers who have been following along will know that Angel has bee in and out of vets with this issue, culminating in a very expensive emergency visit in New York wherein we were nearly certain we would have to put her down. Hydration, in the form of subcutaneous fluids, has always been the key to her recovery: for her entire life, she has not been drinking enough water. Her drinking behavior has also been bizarre, with a compulsive need to slap the water with her paw before drinking.


The only DaVinci in the Americas, Portrait of Ginevra de' Benci, in the National Gallery.

In a last-ditch effort to stave off further kidney damage and a certain demise, we bought her a fountain. Instead of a water bowl, she now drinks from this fountain, which not only provides audible and visual stimulation, also brings the water closer to her head. It has made a huge difference, and her water intake has gone up several fold. The difference in her health has been nothing short of miraculous.

What goes in, though, must come out, and in addition to dramatically increasing her intake, it has also dramatically increased her output, and therein lies a problem. In spite of having added some time ago a second litter box in the saloon, she has been occasionally going on the floor in a handful of spots. And once a cat has marked a spot, there is almost nothing one can do to keep them from going there again.


Washington is allowing a limited number of dockless electric rental scooters during a trial program. This one, from Lime, was abandoned broken in half. Users seem to leave them in the worst places, I knocked one over just walking on a sidewalk. No, I did not pick it up.

Way back when we ripped all the carpet out of the boat in anticipation of cat accidents, I installed woven vinyl flooring in the saloon. It looked great, it felt great, the cats could not really damage it, and it was fairly easy to clean up small accidents of various bodily fluids. But the texture meant it had nooks and crannies, and fluids can and did make their way between the tiles and into the plywood subflooring. The problem reached a tipping point as we were leaving NJ, and we've tried everything we could think of to mitigate it.

Louise actually stopped sitting in the saloon weeks before she left. I'm less sensitive, but it became intolerable for me, too, in spite of myriad applications of enzymes. And I knew if I did nothing to put a stop to it, we'd never get it out of the subfloor, a very expensive proposition. As we were headed into the Potomac, we resolved to get to the store and buy a single piece of impervious sheet vinyl flooring to deal with the problem.

I had to close off the saloon with plastic sheeting during the project, to keep the cat out and the dust in.

With Louise gone, that plan was not going to work. Instead, I ended up buying two smaller pieces, which I bridged with clear shipping tape to form an uninterrupted waterproof barrier. These cut rolls are essentially factory remnants, and I had to settle for  whatever they had; fortunately I found two pieces of the same pattern, which, while a bit dark, is not out of place in the saloon. It took me most of an afternoon to go out to Home Depot on the Metro and schlep the two six-foot-long rolls back home on my shoulders, along with a backpack full of caulk, sandpaper, and other necessities.


Subfloor exposed. The adhesive tape left these wet-looking marks.

Pulling up the old floor along with some of the double-sided tape that held it in place, cleaning the subfloor, sanding down the plywood in the worst spots, and deep treating it with enzymes took a full day. The next day, after the enzymes had done their magic, I cut, positioned, installed, and seamed the vinyl, sealing the edges with a thick bead of silicone caulk. It looks acceptable, and at some point we will replace it with something more appropriate in a single uninterrupted piece. The two cut remnants cost me just $50 total, so I won't mind throwing it away when we get something nicer.


Finished flooring installed. The seam is almost unnoticeable.

I'm not the flexible and energetic young man I once was, and this kind of project now takes a lot out of me. I ended up spending most of the next day recuperating in my easy chair. And so it is that the saloon floor took a full three and a half days out of my otherwise leisurely schedule. I am happy to report that it's working as intended; the cat did spend a full day poking around and wondering what happened.

Somewhere during the great flooring project I was aroused by some commotion outside, which turned out to be the much-hyped arrival of "the Vikings" in the Washington Channel on their way to The Wharf. The arrived under power but stopped south of me to hoist the sail, to very little effect and they took it right back down before even arriving at the dock. But they passed me with the sail up and I snapped a few photos for the blog. Later I was given a much better photo taken from the sixth floor of the apartment complex behind me, with both the Viking ship and Vector in the frame.


Vector and Viking ship Draken Harald Hårfagre. Photo: Pamela Dahill

The ~35 member crew of the Draken Harald Hårfagre have been using the showers and other facilities at the Yacht Club. Conditions on the ship are rustic (we're Vikings, darn it), lacking showers and with only enough berths for the crew to hot-bunk under way. They've been selling tours at $16 a pop to hundreds of tourists, and the stage pier has been full of booths selling tickets and souvenirs and showing construction videos. I know the young multi-national crew have signed on to something allegedly more noble, but it's hard not to view it as little more than a floating cheesy tourist attraction. They left last night after a full ten days in port.


A Swift Boat on display at the Washington Navy Yard. To the right is a pedestrian drawbridge that carries the Anacostia River Trail over the Yards small channel.

I did ultimately resume museum-hopping, along with walking along some of the more picturesque parts of the district. I even offloaded my bicycle, riding it past Fort McNair and up along the Anacostia River past the Washington Navy Yard, staying as much as possible to the fairly new (and thus incomplete) Anacostia River Trail. That part of the district is undergoing considerable urban renewal.


This nice wading fountain is in Yards Park on the Capitol Riverfront near the Navy Yard.

In my travels I did make it to the American Indian museum as well as the National Gallery of Art. In both cases I found the museum architecture at least as interesting as the contents. I also made a brief stop at my old friend the National Air and Space Museum just to see what was new and different. And I spent an afternoon at the Museum of American History, which always has something new and where I am always moved by some of the permanent exhibits like the Star Spangled Banner.


Fellow Stevens alum Sandy Calder is well-represented throughout the city, and a gallery is dedicated to him in the east building of the National Gallery of Art, where hangs this mobile, his last and largest commission.

Late evening walks are also not usually on our agenda as a couple, and so I spent a few of the warmer evenings just strolling the capital at night and enjoying the monuments and buildings that are all carefully lit for dramatic effect. At one point in the evening as I was strolling the Mall, I was passed by no fewer than four groups of young runners in thundering herds, running at matched pace. I would guess some of the local college groups.


Architect I.M. Pei was insistent that this sharp corner on the East Building be built as drawn, and not chamfered as engineers and builders wanted to build it. He took great delight in being vindicated later; the corner is still sharp, and the dark area on the edge from the touch of many hands attests to its popular appeal.

As part of The Wharf project a small dock has been added across the channel at East Potomac Park, more or less right by where we anchored on our last visit. Only non-motorized craft may dock there, but The Wharf runs what they call a "jitney" using a Duffy electric boat during daylight hours. I took the jitney across and strolled the park, discovering that the pro shop cafe at the golf course has the cheapest draft beer on the waterfront. I returned across the channel on foot, continuing on to Penn Quarter for dinner.


A subterranean tunnel connects the east and west buildings of the National Gallery. This outdoor fountain appears to almost come into the tunnel, cascading just inches from the window. Pyramidal skylights above bring light to the underground cafe.

With only a couple of exceptions I have been eating dinner ashore each evening; some days it's the only time I get off the boat. I've been keeping to our tradition of lunch aboard, which for almost two full weeks meant working my way through the salad fixings that we had brought aboard for the two of us for a more leisurely cruise up the Potomac. Nothing spoiled but I will have to throw away the cherry tomatoes Louise bought for herself, which I don't eat.


That same fountain and skylights, as seen from the east building looking at the historic west building.

Our anchor is well-set, and other than a police or fireboat screaming past from the station en route to a call, there's not enough wake or wave action in here to disturb my sleep. But I've been awakened twice in the middle of the night. The first time was a veritable sea of wood debris knocking against the hull, brought in on the tide, and seemingly including every log we dodged on the way up.  If the cat had gotten out she could have walked to shore on an uninterrupted blanket of wood extending all the way to the bulkhead.


Wood from ship to shore, literally.

The other time was when I woke to a considerable amount of rocking and came upstairs to find the winds had increased to 30 knots steady and gusting higher. I stowed a couple of things and put the safety line on the tender and went back to bed. When I woke in the morning the small sailboat behind me had dragged perhaps 500' down the anchorage, fortunately missing the other anchored boat and also stopping short of hitting the bulkhead. Had the wind been blowing the other way I would have had to spend the night watching him.


I took another photo in the morning, but by then half of it had drifted away.

As Louise's stay in California has drawn out, I've lately ventured a bit further afield. A couple of days ago I rode the Metro down to Alexandria, taking the free trolley bus down to the waterfront and then strolling the historic district. I dined at Gadsby's Tavern, where George Washington, among other prominent early Americans, once ate, before getting back on the trolley and heading home.


Gadsby's Tavern. Unassuming and easy to miss from the outside.

Yesterday I had something of a boatman's holiday, dropping ten bucks on a Water Taxi ride up to Georgetown. I wanted to do that stretch of the Potomac, and Vector can't normally make it under the series of bridges en route. I was the only passenger on the 80 person ferry, and I ended up chatting with the skipper, also Sean, the whole trip. I spent the afternoon in Georgetown, where the historic C&O Canal is currently devoid of water while it undergoes restoration. I have a nice dinner at casual Italian bistro Flavio before coming back on the Circulator bus, a much more reasonable $1 per ride.


Looking downstream on the empty C&O. Narrow section is a lock.

When I am not gallivanting around DC, of course, I am working on the boat. In addition to the floor project, I also ended up climbing the mast to work on the satellite dish, which quit working right after Annapolis. I took it apart all the way to the board level, where I found two fuses and hoped to find one blown. They were both intact, though, and I put it all back together in defeat, resolving to get some help. When I turned the breaker back on it fired right up, so I can only conclude either the fuse/holders or the power connector were suffering poor contact due to corrosion.


Conning tower of USS Balao at the Washington Navy Yard. Balao was perhaps most famous for starring in Operation Petticoat as the pink submarine.

At one point my shower seemed a bit tepid and I found a melted wire in the power connection to the water heater, which blew the fuse. The generator quit one day and I had to replace an impeller. And my laptop keyboard dropped a couple of characters so I had to order a replacement and install it with a hot-melt glue gun that I bought at the aforementioned full-service hardware store. I also spent the better part of a day repairing and reprogramming a damaged Android phone.


Now Watergate does not bother me...

While the weather here was absolutely gorgeous for over a week, dry and sunny with temperatures around 80, the cold front that has gripped much of the east has made its way here. Today barely made it into the mid-50s, perfect to stay in and blog, and tomorrow will be a last hurrah in the mid-60s before daytime temps drop into the low 50s with low 40s overnight. I was running air conditioning with the generator two weeks ago and now it's the heaters.

Nothing in the long-term forecast looks to be changing that trend, and so when Louise returns we will take a couple of days for her to recuperate and decompress, perhaps have a nice dinner at the City Club in a belated celebration of her birthday, and then weigh anchor for points south. Between now and then I will get the boat squared away for travel and then tick off whatever else I can on my sights-to-see list. It's possible or maybe even likely that my next post here will be while under way in the Potomac.


Google Street View guy gotta eat. Food trucks are ubiquitous here. That's the Wharf shuttle on the left.

Project and schedule update

As I wrote in my last post, in and among being a tourist while masquerading as a local, I've also been busy on the project front. Spending three weeks in one place with a good delivery address has allowed us to catch up on a backlog of Amazon Prime orders, and it's a short Metro ride to Ace Hardware or Home Depot from here.

Bilge Fan

First up was a project that has languished on my list for nearly two years, since we replaced all the waste tanks at the yard. It's steadily ratcheted up in priority over that time as the work in the bilges has aged; to wit, adding a small fan to exhaust the bilge. All boats get bilge odors, and Vector is no exception. The gray water sump, for example, has no external vent, and even theoretically impermeable sewage hoses do exude an odor after they have aged a bit.

When we replaced the tanks, we ended up with an extra inch-and-a-half vent pipe leading from the bilge up to a deck opening inside a locker in the Portuguese bridge. My plan has been to put a small fan at the bilge end of this pipe to create a slight negative pressure in the bilge at all times. Not enough to purge any sort of large volume of gas (we'd still know it in short order if we had any kind of leak), but enough to keep "routine" bilge odors from migrating up into the cabin.

I ordered a 40mm, 12-volt computer fan for the purpose, reasoning that the 40mm fan opening is exactly the same size as the ID of the existing vent pipe. Computer fans are, of course, square, and I needed to somehow adapt this to the round, threaded pipe fitting, located in a very tight space in the bilge.


40mm computer fan, with the corners rounded off. About $4 on Amazon.

Without disassembling either the black waste tank or part of the forward head, it's really impossible to work on the end of this pipe. I knew I'd have to pre-assemble the fan and then somehow thread it into the fitting. A simple pipe section had occupied that space previously, and there was a notch in a cross-beam to accommodate it -- not enough room to rotate an assembly much larger in diameter than the pipe itself.


The fan mounted inside a 1.5" PVC MIP/Slip adapter, looking from the threaded end.

I ended up picking up a PVC adapter with male threads on one end to mate with the existing 1-1/2" galvanized pipe elbow, and a slightly larger slip fitting on the other end intended to mate with 1-1/2" PVC pipe. Using a hacksaw and a file I rounded off the corners of the computer fan to fit tightly inside the slip fitting, where it is held in place by simple friction and backed up by a ring of foam weatherstrip tape to keep air from escaping around the edges.


Louise took this photo of me crammed into the bilge. My right hand is on my stomach because it did not fit anywhere else. Hard to see, but there's not a lot of clearance between my chest and that beam. Note the pipe at my right shoulder and the hose under my left arm. My left hip is against the waste tank.

In order to reach the existing pipe to thread this assembly in, I had to lie on my back, squeezed in between the black tank and a bulkhead, and do a sort of limbo under a support beam. In this position I could get only one arm and hand under the beam, and it was my left one to boot. Making matters a bit worse, I found my fan assembly to be just a bit too wide to squeak past the aforementioned notched beam, and I had to do some left-handed filing with a coarse wood file to enlarge the notch a bit first.


The finished assembly. You can see the notch at the top of the photo that I needed to enlarge, and the brown weatherstrip tape around the inside of the PVC fitting. I had to mate those electrical connectors one-handed after crimping them on elsewhere.

All's well that ends well, and once installed and connected to power the fan is working just fine. We did not need to call the fire department or the Coast Guard to extricate me from the bilge, although it was beginning to seem that way toward the end. I was a bit sore the next day. As a side note, you can not maintain a boat if you have claustrophobia -- I had to close my eyes and take a few deep breaths more than once.

Laundry Center Power

As I wrote here back in September, being able to do laundry under way without running the generator had been a long-term goal, and I finally had gotten around to poring over the wiring diagrams for the laundry center (a stacked washer-dryer affair intended for apartments), even opening up the cabinets to see how it was all put together. An integrated unit like this has just a single power cord to operate both the washer and dryer.

It didn't take long to figure out that the washer runs exclusively on 120 volt power sourced from just one leg of the incoming 120/240 volt, four-wire circuit. The dryer controls are run by the other 120-volt leg, with the dryer heating elements powered by 240 volts sourced from both legs.

While it is "fudging" a bit (such an installation would technically not meet code on land), this particular wiring arrangement allowed me to simply provide 120-volt power to only the relevant leg, from the inverter, to get the washer working, using switching apparatus completely external to the washer/dryer in the incoming power circuit. That was a much simpler alternative to opening up and internally modifying the hard-to-access washer/dryer assembly.


This DPDT power relay supplies 120v inverter power, coming from bottom right in this photo on a temporary cord, to one leg of the laundry center, connected at the left. When the 240-volt circuit at upper right is energized, the relay connects the laundry center to that power source instead.

I put the required gear together as a prototype back in September, just in time to be able to do laundry under way on our last open-ocean passages, where we could still make the necessary water. I already had the required 30-amp DPDT power relay on hand, and there was already a junction box in-line in the laundry center circuit (left over from the big main AC panel project that went along with the inverter installation). I used a three-wire power cord with grounded plug that I had lying around for the inverter input on the prototype, and we plugged it into an existing inverter outlet with an extension cord.


All buttoned up in a proper enclosure, with permanently run inverter power.

Having proven this all works as intended, I needed to run a permanent feed from the inverter circuit to the relay, and contain the entire assembly in a proper enclosure. The enclosure cost me more, at $16, than the rest of the project. Now the washer works any time we want, and the dryer works when on shore or generator power, with no thinking or manual switching required.

Sound Bar

Regular readers may remember the hoops we went through to get a new TV for the saloon incorporating an all-important headphone jack. After many hours of research I turned to our readership for help. That led to some false starts, even returning a model ordered online that turned out to be 60% thicker than claimed in the specs. We eventually found a perfect fit, with a headphone jack, at Walmart, and it has served well for two years.

Getting that TV installed was a big project, including cutting a hole in the bulkhead for all the wires and then snaking the power, antenna, A/V, HDMI, and headphone cables through it from various directions. With the headphone jack inconveniently buried between the TV and the bulkhead, a permanently attached headphone extension cable runs from the TV to a location in a cabinet across the saloon, near my chair.

This arrangement works perfectly for one person to watch TV. But the TV's built-in speakers are disconnected when anything is plugged in to the headphone jack, and so when we want to watch a movie together, or put news or weather on during a major incident, or even use DirecTV's music channels to play holiday music in the house, I have to remove a drawer in the galley, crawl under the counter, and wedge my fingers through the aforementioned hole to gently tug the headphone cable out of the jack so the speakers will work. If I tug too hard and the plug comes out entirely, getting it back in is a struggle.

Fortunately, this is an infrequent occurrence; Louise seldom watches anything with me, and so I've gone through this exercise perhaps only a dozen times so far, including a couple of times when we've had guests aboard and wanted to watch a DVD. Still, it's tedious, and perhaps more importantly, I've grown concerned that any more tugging on the cord would lead to failure of the cord or, worse, the jack, creating a much bigger problem. Or else one of these days I'd damage something with the heavy drawer of dishware that needs to come out in the process, twice.

We did not have this issue on the bus, because I had designed in a fancy surround-sound system involving a high-end Technics receiver/amplifier and a Bose 5+1 speaker setup. Push-buttons on the amp allowed me to turn the speakers on or off regardless of the headphone status. I had envisioned, perhaps foolishly, that we'd watch some number of DVD or BluRay movies in surround sound, and use the system for music regularly; in practice I can count on both hands the number of times we watched something in surround sound in nine years on the bus, and the only time we ever had any music on was around the holidays. It proved a waste of money and space.

Not wanting to repeat that mistake, we opted not to have any sort of audio system on the boat other than a portable weatherproof Bluetooth speaker box to stream music whenever and wherever we wanted it. We deemed the built-in speakers on the TV sufficient for movies as needed, and that would be true if not for the headphone-jack contortions.

Enter the "sound bar," a compact stereo speaker system with built-in amplifier, meant to complement today's flat-panel TV systems. Our TV has a digital optical audio output in addition to the headphone jack, and I hunted around until I found an inexpensive sound bar with a digital audio input and which was small enough to mount comfortably in the saloon. I found a Vizio model on Amazon Prime for $78 which, as a bonus, connects to our cell phones and iPads via Bluetooth so we can stream music to it.


Our new sound bar under the vent register. The TV is below right, behind its custom quilted cover.

Sound bars are meant to be installed just below the TV screen, and typically one uses a bar about the same width as the TV. Since our TV takes up all the wall space immediately above the back of the settee, that was not an option for us, so instead I mounted it under the A/C vent register, above and to the left of the TV and facing the room at an angle. It's close enough for the stereo TV audio to sound natural. I had just enough room in this spot for a 29" bar, which is about the shortest made.

Mounting it in this spot meant fishing more cables. I drilled a 1/2" hole in a spot hidden behind the bar for the power cord and optical cable; on this latter item I also had to order a 10' cable to reach the TV via the somewhat circuitous route the cable has to follow between the devices. A 3' cable came with the bar. The cables run down in about a half-inch space behind a wood panel that conceals the engine room vent duct. I took the lamp and A/C control already on that panel off so I could fish the cables through.

There's no way to get my eyeball back there, so I started with my electrician's fish rod, and after poking a couple of times the fish came through under the settee and I thought I would be good to go. I thought that same half-inch gap ran the width of the panel. Using the fish rod I pulled a nylon pull-string from under the settee all the way to the new hole. Then I used the pull-string to try to pull the optical cable through, only to have it stop abruptly at the top of the settee.

I managed to get my phone up under the back of the settee far enough to snap a photo of the problem. What I discovered was that, by chance, my fish had managed to find a fairly small hole that had been drilled for the A/C control cable, which comprises a length of "silver satin" telephone cord with phone-style connectors. The hole was big enough for the fish rod, the nylon pull string, and even the power connector for the sound bar, but the molded end of the optical cable was much too large to fit.


Looking up behind the settee. The pink item is the nylon pull cord, going through the same hole as the silver-satin flat control cable. The black at the upper left of the photo is the curved back of the settee. The lower right third of the photo is the aluminum engine room duct. A piece of reinforced vinyl hose is at the bottom right of the shot.

By cramming my torso into the galley cabinet behind the TV, I could reach this hole just with my fingertips, but there was really no way to make a new, larger hole. I was able to clean up the existing hole a bit with a round file, but not enough to fit the cable end. What I finally ended up doing was whittling the molded rubber cable end down with a utility knife until it was barely larger diameter than the business end of the connector. It took me a few tries, but I was then able to cram it through the hole from below, then use a gripper tool to grab the cable from above and pull it through.

The whole project, which ought to have been an hour job, took me perhaps four hours, not including the delay in the middle where I had to go to the hardware store for angle brackets to hang it from the ceiling. The brackets that come with the unit are suitable only for mounting to a flat, vertical wall. It's all working well, though, and I'm quite happy to never again have to crawl through a drawer hole to unplug the headphone cord.

Camera System

As long as we had a good delivery address and I was hunting for things on Amazon, I started on the camera surveillance project. This has been a "nice to have" project that has languished due to its perceived "luxury" nature, the idea being that it would be nice to have a camera on the aft deck to make it easier to back the boat into a slip, and one in the engine room to keep an eye on things down there from the pilothouse. These sorts of cameras are very common on boats like Vector.

This project moved up the list quite rapidly after our friends aboard Blossom experienced an engine room fire under way in Nassau Harbor. Blossom, at least, has a window in their engine room door, so they were able to see the fire before opening the door and make an informed decision to go in. We have no window, and so a camera in there may be the only way to know whether or not it is even safe to open the door.

Our initial thinking had been for only live cameras. But Blossom's experience caused us to rethink that, too. After the incident was all over, they realized they could go back through the stored video, which proved instrumental in establishing the timeline of the fire and pinpointing exactly where it started. We decided to add a DVR to the project for exactly this reason. A side benefit will be additional security for the boat, as we will have a stored video record of any incident aboard.


Angel helping me pre-scope cable routes for the cameras Here she is under the pilothouse settee, next to the air conditioner.

Complete kits with cameras, cables, and DVR can be had on Amazon now for less than $200, and I selected a package with a 500gb DVR and four night-vision dome-style cameras. Installing this will be a major project which I did not want to start here in DC, but I needed to scope out the cable runs and camera locations to make sure I was ordering the right system.

MiFi Update

As long as I am posting administrative updates, I might as well tell you we got some bad news yesterday about our whizzy new unlimited Verizon MiFi service that we picked up late September: it is being terminated at the end of the month.

We were well aware this might happen at any time, although we had really hoped we'd get at least a few months out of it first. We ended up paying $143 to have this for barely two months, and to date, we've only used about 20gb total. Legalized gambling, really -- we gambled and we lost. We could have spent less money to just bump up Louise's cell data for the two months. Oh well. No word yet on whether or not we get to keep the MiFi device itself, or if it can even be re-activated on another plan.

Schedule Update

At this writing we are still in our cozy anchorage in DC. Louise is back aboard and mostly recovered from her jet lag; we decided to stay an extra couple of days to take advantage of pleasant weather this week. We've been to the Museum of Natural History, Cleveland Park, and back to the City Club. Tonight we have dinner reservations at Old Ebbitt Grill.

All good things must come to an end, though, and we will be weighing anchor early in the morning either tomorrow or Saturday, heading downriver to Quantico. We have dinner plans with friends on the Northern Neck Monday, and we plan to be at Olverson's Marina there Monday afternoon, where we can grab one of the courtesy cars for our visit. As long as we are in the area, we'll also go out to check on Odyssey on Tuesday, which would put our earliest departure from the Potomac sometime on Wednesday.

I am very happy to say that we do not have a single thing planned after that. We'll be heading south, as a matter of comfort -- it will soon be cold enough here that we'll need the heater more than just a couple of hours a day. From the lower Chesapeake, there is no percentage for us in going outside around Cape Hatteras, so we will retrace the now familiar route south through Hampton Roads and the northern section of the AICW down to Beaufort, NC. Regular readers will remember that we ended up there for Thanksgiving last year, and, who knows, we may be right there again this year.

From there we will make one or more outside hops in the Atlantic to warmer climes in our new home state of Florida. We've never cruised up the Saint Johns River any further than its intersection with the ICW, and perhaps this year will be the one wherein we actually go all the way to Jacksonville and beyond. Maybe we'll visit our "home" address in Green Cove Springs, or even the Elks lodge there to which we now belong.

What I know is that our calendar is very fuzzy after the new year. We could return to the Bahamas and perhaps beyond, down into the Caribbean. Or we could explore further up the gulf coast of Florida and then into the Gulf of Mexico and the other gulf states. There has even been some talk of a re-try of the Cuba rally that disintegrated last year, now that rules are even further relaxed. We really just don't know, which is actually a great place to be.

Capital idea

A half month has flown by here in Washington, DC, where we are anchored in the Washington Channel (map). I am seriously behind on the blog, with much to report and plenty of photos, so grab a cup of coffee or a beer and settle in -- I'll wait.


The view from our dinner table at Redstone American Grill. The lights on the Capital Wheel lit up the whole marina.

When last I posted here (well, not counting the mini-post about technical difficulties with Twitterfeed, which seem to be resolved), we were still at National Harbor, just south of DC and about seven miles from here on the river. We enjoyed our short stay there and our visit with our friends Bradley and Kathy aboard Shear Madness.


National Harbor marina. You can see the Washington Monument in the distance to the right; Vector is bottom center, just behind the two large yachts. Taken from the top floor of the Gaylord hotel.

In addition to wandering the immense complex there, we enjoyed dinner and breakfast at two of the restaurants, walked through the Gaylord Resort, which was very reminiscent of the Opryland Hotel (also a Gaylord property), and rode the Capital Wheel. The view from the wheel is spectacular, but the inside secret is that you can get the same view for free by riding the elevator to the top of the Gaylord. Fortunately we did not pay extra for the Wheel, as our friends garnered some free passes for us.


Vector from atop the Capital Wheel. That's Shear Madness off our port quarter (top right of photo).

About mid-day we dropped lines, stopped at the pumpout dock, and then headed up the Potomac to DC. It was a pleasant cruise, and I was struck by how relaxed the waterfront is here, as compared to New York. We saw no Coast Guard boats, no Harbor Patrol boats, and no law enforcement of any kind, a stark contrast to New York Harbor where the Coasties have their 50-caliber guns mounted and at the ready, and law enforcement vessels are everpresent. Considering you can't walk down the street here without passing officers from three or four different agencies, the waterfront seemed anomalous.

Washington sits at the confluence of the Potomac and Anacostia rivers; between the two is the Washington Channel, which leads to the Tidal Basin by way of the neighborhood known as Southwest Waterfront. Several marinas line the channel, along with the docks for a half dozen tour boats. The channel is a dead end, closed to navigation at the cluster of bridges that separate it from the Tidal Basin, and there is room here for a dozen or so boats to anchor.

After circling the anchorage we selected a spot immediately across from the brand new docks of the Capital Yacht Club and dropped the hook. We contacted the DC Harbor Patrol, a requirement for vessels anchoring here, gave them our details, and received our clearance.

We were ruminating about dropping the tender for dinner or just eating aboard when I spotted Bradley and his new deckhand, Austin, cruising up the channel in their tender. Bradley told me the tender had been sitting a while and he wanted to breeze it out; we ended up getting in with them and heading over to the Cantina Marina restaurant at the nearby Gangplank Marina for dinner.


Sunset over East Potomac Park and the Washington Channel from the Cantina Marina. That's Greta Van Susteren's Trumpy motor yacht, "Sophie," at the dock on the right.

In the morning we dropped the tender and checked in with the yacht club, who provided us a card key to access the docks, bathrooms, lounge, and bar. We pay $16 per day for the privilege, which includes Internet access..


East Potomac Park to our south. That's the Marine Corps Marathon in progress, the day I took Louise to the airport.

Looking up the channel to the northwest we can see the Washington Monument, soaring behind the Mandarin Oriental hotel, and the dome of the Jefferson Memorial. To our south is East Potomac Park, home to the Park Police, a golf course, and a waterfront trail popular with cyclists and runners. Across the channel, just beyond the new docks, is a giant construction project, The Wharf, a mixed-use development to revitalize the waterfront. We hear the pile drivers during the day, but it has not been any sort of problem.


Vector at anchor, as seen from East Potomac Park. To the right you can see the yacht club docks, with the construction cranes and L'Enfant Plaza behind. At left is the I-395 bridge and the Washington Monument.

Beyond the construction project is L'Enfant Plaza, a Brutalist-style office/retail complex where we can access the Metro in almost any direction. There was once a four-star hotel on the upper levels, the first place I ever stayed in DC, in my youth and shortly after the complex opened. I had hoped to go there one evening for dinner, but the hotel closed in 2013 for a year-long renovation and has never reopened.

An easy few-block walk to our east is a nice, new Safeway grocery store, along with a CVS and a couple of trendy restaurants. We wandered over early on to check it out and to descend to the Metro station there to buy the new SmartCards we needed for the Metro and buses, trading in the collection of paper FareCards I'd been saving, including the Obama inauguration commemorative one. I was amused to see one of these at the Smithsonian later.


The President flies over Vector. East Potomac Park in the background.

The Washington Channel and the Tidal Basin are used as visual landmarks for the helicopters that are an everyday presence in DC. That includes a pair of VIP transports that shuttle back and forth to the Pentagon (the most frequent of the lot), the Coast Guard patrolling the river, a few fully-armed gunships assigned to defend high-value targets in the city, and of course the white-topped VIP transports that serve as Marine One, carrying the President. The choppers run at all hours but mostly have not been a bother. One day I was heading ashore in the tender when I heard the rumble; I was able to get the camera out just in time to catch the President flying right over Vector (three white-tops in formation is a sure sign that one of them has the Commander-in-Chief aboard).

Louise's dad, Jerry, and stepmom, Kay, had booked a cruise this month out of New York City, and when they learned we'd be in DC for a couple of weeks, they added a stop here to their itinerary. It was fortuitous timing, in that their cruise departed just a day or so before Louise's flight to Houston. They arrived here a couple of days after we settled in, and we were able to catch up over dinner and do some sightseeing together.

Jerry wanted to see the Udvar-Hazy Center out in Chantilly, Virginia near Dulles Airport, and I've wanted to see it for a long time as well. We've actually spent a good deal of time in that neighborhood working at the Red Cross facility there, but Louise detests air and space museums, so we'd never stopped; this was my big chance. We rented a car and the four of us drove out for the day, and I found it very enjoyable.


The Mobile Quarantine Facility from Apollo 11. That's the space shuttle Discovery in the background, still charred from its final return from space.

I typically don't take photos at museums; there are far better photos than I can take available on-line of every museum artifact in the world. (I seldom take photos of buildings or monuments for the same reason.) But I could not resist snapping a shot of the Apollo 11 "Mobile Quarantine Facility" manufactured by Airstream and looking much like one of their travel trailers. I credit the moon shots with putting "Airstream" into the lexicon of the non-RVing American public, myself included. I was a boy of eight when I first saw this very artifact on TV, with an as-yet unsullied President Nixon standing in front of it and Armstrong, Aldrin, and Collins beaming big smiles from inside. It is, perhaps, one of the early contributors to me catching the RV bug -- cool enough for astronauts, cool enough for me.


The space suit, at the White House Astronomy Night. Photo by Matias Ocner, SHFWire.

At the end of the day, as we were all sitting in a set of chairs resting our poor feet, two museum staff walked past us wheeling a large space suit, fully assembled and held upright on a metal rack with casters. I casually said "there's something you don't see every day." I did not realize it at the time, but the suit was just returning from the White House, having been on display there the previous evening as part of the White House Astronomy Night. I'm sorry I did not snap a photo of it rolling by.


View over the Tidal Basin from the tour bus. We are on the bridge and Vector is behind me.

One day we elected to do one of the hop-on, hop-off bus tours of the city. Call us corny, but we actually like to do these in cities with lots to see; it's easier on Louise's feet than most of the alternatives, and sometimes the narration can be hilarious. We did two different loops across two days on a 24-hour ticket; on the first day the open-air bus managed to be in just the right place to get stopped for fifteen minutes while the metro police closed off the roads for Obama's chopper to land. We could not see the south lawn but the bird flew right past us. On the second day we needed to get a cab back to Jerry and Kay's hotel from the final stop, and once again they closed the streets (for a motorcade, I think) just in front of us.

The President, stopping traffic again. You can see the police in front of us; White House is off frame to the left.

We did not really hop on and off the bus except for one stop, at the National Cathedral. I opted not to go inside (I've been there before) and instead walked around the grounds. Both of the west towers have been constructed since my first visit, and all three towers are again sporting scaffolding as they continue to repair damage from the 2011 earthquake. As a side note, we boarded this bus at the Washington Hilton, at the conference entrance, in more or less the exact spot where President Ronald Reagan was shot by John Hickley, Jr. in 1981. The spot looks much the same as it did 34 years ago.


The National Cathedral. You can't make him out, but Darth Vader is in this photo.

While Jerry and Kay were in town we also enjoyed the International Spy Museum, not far from their hotel, and we had a couple of casual meals in their neighborhood. I'm sure the hotel cost them a small fortune (DC is an expensive city), and we helped them get the most of it by crashing the complimentary cocktail hour a couple of evenings. It was a nice visit, and we bid them farewell as they grabbed a cab to the airport after breakfast at the hotel.


I wandered the terminal after accompanying Louise to National Airport. This is the "historic" terminal; I remember this space as bustling the last time I passed through it.

That left us a day to ourselves for Louise to pack for her own trip and to square the boat away. We also had a nice dinner at the City Club before being apart for a week. Regular readers are probably aware that Louise is in Houston right now, at the International Quilt Festival held there each year. She returns this afternoon, and I've been stag for eight days now.



That's given me a week to do all the power-walk activities that her chronic plantar fasciitis does not allow us to do together. I used the time to revisit some old favorites, and also to see some of the places that I've just never managed to make it to in perhaps a dozen visits to the city.


LM-2 in two pieces. You can make out the top of the descent motor in the lower section. That's Chuck Yeager's Glamoris Glennis in between the ascent and descent stages, also being worked on.

I started at the Air and Space Museum, where I caught some exhibits I'd never seen before, although many have been there forever and are looking a bit dated. They are in the process of moving their Lunar Module and I got a photo I am unlikely to repeat, with the ascent and descent stages separated and most of the Mylar removed.


A better view of the ascent stage. The pile of Kapton film (gold/Mylar) to cover it is at lower right. A small army of conservators was working on these artifacts during my visit.

As I came around a corner in the observatory exhibit, I found myself facing a familiar sight, the eyepiece end of the Great Lick Refractor. Well, actually just a life-size photo of same, with an actual spectrograph attached to the "telescope" in the photo. I recognized it instantly, having spent a full night with this telescope a decade ago in Odyssey; two familiar names, Remington Stone and Laurie Hatch, were on the explanatory placard.


A remarkably life-like image of a telescope, with a real instrument attached to it.

I also went for my first time to the National Archives to browse the exhibits and put eyes on the originals of our most cherished founding documents. Other firsts for me included the Library of Congress and the Supreme Court. And I made a repeat visit to the Capitol after some 40 years; without gallery tickets I had to settle for the guided tour of the building.


Mandatory Zoo photo of a giant panda.


The "O-Line" which lets the orangutans move between two enclosures, even crossing the walkway. New since my last visit.

I took most of a day to wander around the zoo, and I also visited the National Museum of American History. This building was closed for renovation on our last visit here; I was a bit sad to see the Foucault pendulum that was a centerpiece of the building is now gone forever, as are many of the computing exhibits. That's consistent with the change from it being the Museum of History and Technology; I understand the computers and maybe the pendulum will reappear in the historic Arts and Industries building as part of a new Technology museum when that building completes the renovation it is currently undergoing.


My only photo from the history museum, for one of our distinguished readers. One of the original puppets.

No blog post would be complete without an update on the unending boat projects, but I've droned on for too long already, so I will bore you with those in a later post. For now I will leave you with one last photo, flooding in East Potomac Park as seen from our deck, during this weeks extremely high tides.


If you look closely you can see park benches, behind the fence, peeking up out of the water.

I'll try to do one more update before we leave DC, with some thoughts about our plans for heading south.