Well! before the well-grounded sights and sounds of erstwhile aero-fantasies, flying high was perhaps just a metaphor to describe the super-achievers, but now flying high is literal - perhaps as literal as "Roving Mars" is today! Yes, you heard me right ... today Spirit and Opportunity are roving Mars - the fascinating feats of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, CA. "NASA's twin robot geologists, the Mars Exploration Rovers, launched toward Mars on June 10 and July 7, 2003, in search of answers about the history of water on Mars. They landed on Mars January 3 and January 24 PST. The Mars Exploration Rover mission is part of NASA's Mars Exploration Program, a long-term effort of robotic exploration of the red planet. Primary among the mission's scientific goals is to search for and characterize a wide range of rocks and soils that hold clues to past water activity on Mars..." To know more about this fascinating story of Martian revelations - read on!
Well! the Smithsonian National Air & Space Museum (6th & Independence Ave, Washington, DC) had a lot to offer ... including this awesome documentary featuring the Martian Rovers, replete with images shot by the "MERs" (Mars Exploration Rovers), in the Lockheed Martin IMAX theater. Though it was tempting to keeping venturing through the tiers of air and space achivements at the museum, I took visual snapshots of select ventures. Among them, the 1903 Wright Flyer, the world’s first successful powered airplane, made me smile and sigh! It had a very brief operational history alright, with its entire flying career being on a single chilly December morning in 1903 in North Carolina. Yet, it was indeed a golden morning that let man feel and steal away the aerospace flavors, across the apricot tinted horizons and beyond! Yes, the flying machine was born in the cradle of the earthian skies and was destined to span the global skies!
Savoring the pages of history, walking westward on Pennsylvania Ave (yes! toward 1600 Pennsylvania Ave), we zipped in and out of the DC museums packed with - all you can see - goodies ... yet! little did the marvels of science and nature in the Smithsonian museums serve to satiate our, by then, burgeoning appetites ... so we scurried to a colorful ristorante in downtown DC to do justice to our starved tummies ...
Recalling the adventures from the previous evening, evening of the 25th, we drove to Columbia, Maryland, midway between Baltimore and DC, to relish a wonderful evening with my cousin and her cute family - Lali (didi), Papu (dada), and little Ishaan, made a cute Columbian family, warm and welcoming - this was the first time I met Ishaan, a toddler of about two, and nah! didn't add on to his stock of "Baby Einstein" toys. Read and bought these charming little children's books - tales for toddlers in Ballston, Arlington's, B. Dalton Books. Well! who's to say beautifully written toddlers' tales can't fascinate fully hatched and matured chickens :) Talking about the Ballston Mall - comfortably placed next to our hotel in Arlington (separated by a couple skywalks and NSF) - it had a Panera Bread, one of my favorite sandwich places and yes! I did have a portabella-mozarella and Saurabh had a low fat soup to keep us steady, without grumbling tummies in our hour's drive to Columbia, MA. Yes! three states in a row, Virginia, Maryland, and well! a quasi-state DC ... hey man! who doesn't want to upgrade her state count ... mine stands at 12+1 ... what's yours? hey, btw, don't count states you just stopped by to fill gas in your gas-guzzling giants ;)
Postscript: Notice how I love using alliterations ... well! my next in line literary teeming tingles could well be oxymorons ... any thing for rookies?!
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