Shuttle Discovery arriving at Udvar Hazy (Doug Francis via Flickr)
One interesting thing about living in Northern Virginia is that your friends and family will be motivated to come and visit.
With Washington D.C. just a short drive away (10 – 25 minutes on the weekend) and destinations like the Smithsonian, Air & Space Museum, National Archives or the Cherry Blossoms, who can blame them? On any given week, there are some pretty cool events going on.
On Tuesday, I experienced one of those unique events when Space Shuttle Discovery arrived at the Udvar-Hazy Center in Chantilly, Virginia. Knowing that this was a historic event, we kept the kids home from school and headed out to the historic Sully Plantation which offered a great view of the final approach.
The initial flyby of Discovery caught us by surprise as I was taking some photos of the 1750’s plantation house. Since we knew that Discovery had arrived in the area, my wife who is a Fairfax County teacher taking a “personal day”, called her school to alert them. Based on that intel, the school’s Principal ran a required monthly fire drill which got all the kids outside just as the shuttle flew over the area.
Now that’s education!
Living here offers plenty of opportunities to be a part of historic events, or go to historic places that you have only read about. Although we were at Sully Plantation to get a view of the Discovery, I highly recommend taking a tour of it too.
To see all my Space Shuttle Discovery photos on Flickr, click here.
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