Sometimes I'll be sitting in my car driving somewhere and realize that it's been a long time since I've written anything here. In those moments I begin to mentally write that entry and always begin it with "I know it's been a long time since I've written anything here, and so much has happened since I last wrote." It sounds completely trite, so I always mentally erase those words and then get distracted by something.

This past week I have been taking the first week-long vacation in the last six years. My first thought when I asked for this week off was to sit around the house and do absolutely nothing, and that stayed the plan for about a week. Then one night we got a copy of Air Force One delivered from Netflix, and as we watched Harrison Ford kick some disaffected Khazikstani ass, I started to browse Wikipedia for entries about fighter jets.

It was about half a dozen clicks later that I got to a page about the Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center, also known as the Air and Space Annex. I've been hearing about this marvelous place since they started moving all the fancy old planes into the hangar at IAD, but have never had the free time to drive down there for no reason.

I kept reading and found out that they had an SR-71 Blackbird in display. This is a plane that I've loved since I was a little kid. I even had a big picture of one on my wall while I was growing up, and a die-cast model about four inches long that was one of my favorite toys ever. And not once in all those years did I ever have the chance to see in person. So a plan began to build.

Suzy chipped in some suggestions, and by the time my vacation week rolled around, our schedule for the first two days was packed.

On Monday we got out of the house around quarter to nine and after a quick stop for breakfast, camera batteries, and a new headlight we headed straight for Fort Meade, MD to visit the National Cryptologic Museum at the National Security Agency.

We joined a tour in progress just in front of the Enigma machines. Our museum docent, Howell McConnell was a really great storyteller and had me jotting down a whole bunch of historical figures that somehow I had never learned about before, like the British spy "Garbo" and the codes in slave quilts. He also intimated that the world would soon be revolutionized by Howard R. Johnson's Permanent Magnet Motor, but I think he might have been kidding about that.

We got a chance to see the Ziegler and FROSTBURG computers that NSA only recently took out of service. The FROSTBURG looks like something out of a science-fiction movie, and goes to show you what happens when you give engineers free reign over their user interface. Check out my galleries or the Wikipedia entry for some pictures.

I also looked up our docent when we got back, and found that he was a presenter at the Black Hat Windows 2000 Security Conference. I only wish I had known earlier to ask him about it.

I picked up a shiny NSA lapel pin from the gift shop, and an hour and forty-five minutes later we were on our way to Dulles, VA to visit the Air and Space Annex.

Traffic around the beltway and Dulles Toll Road was great mid-day and after a quick coffee and meal at a shopping center one exit down the road, we arrived at the museum just as the weather started getting lousy. We walked around everything for a good two hours taking pictures of the Concorde, SR-71, fighter jets, engines, gliders, and the Enola Gay before our legs started to feel like jelly and it was time to head to Haymarket.

We had a great dinner with Geoff and Christi at their house on the mountain and then we were off to Luray, VA to crash in a hotel room with a Jacuzzi and a mountain view. To say the Jacuzzi made my day would be something of an understatement. We watched The Daily Show from across the room while drinking cans of Yoo-Hoo.

We slept in as long as possible the next day, checked out on the dot of 11am and headed off to Luray Caverns after breakfast at Southern Station. The whole place is almost exactly as it was the last time I was there, probably about 17 years ago. Suzy had been there last an equally long time ago, and we took pictures until our batteries ran out, then split a set of batteries I had in my pocket and two from my flashlight so we could make it all the way through the caverns. I probably took about 90 pictures down there in the mile and a quarter we walked through the caves, and I'm sure Suzy did at least the same.

We drove home afterwards via Skyline Drive and took lots of pictures. Except for some small but scary patches of fog where the clouds decided to touch the mountain in some inopportune places (Suzy has a picture that makes it look like we're about to drive into a big white wall just a few feet down the road), and some deer on the side of the road that looked too confused for their own good, it was a nice drive through the mountains.

We probably spent triple the time we spent in the park stuck in traffic around the DC Beltway, but got to listen to an episode of Dr. Oz on Oprah and Friends channel with Dr. Neil Theise, which was a really interesting program. We also got back in time to watch a new episode of House.

Total time out was 35 hours and 13 minutes, in which we drove 376.5 miles round trip and spent about a dollar per mile including a new AAA membership purchased for hotel discounts and a little peace of mind.

Wednesday I did a bit of housework, then went to the Baltimore Amateur Radio Club meeting where I celebrated the ten year anniversary of my amateur radio license (issued November 14, 1996) by bringing a cake for everyone to enjoy, and got to see a presentation of homebrew ingenuity by three of the club members, including a refurbished power supply for the same radio transciever model that was installed in Capt. Gary Powers' U-2.

Thursday we braved the rain and storms and did the D.C. tourist thing at the National Museum of Natural History and National Gallery of Art. I have a pad full of rocks and dinosaurs I want to learn about from the first, and names of artists, sculptors, and photographers from the second.

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