Day 30 - 15 Oct: Washington, DC, to New York, NY

Finished packing up our stuff this morning then took a quick trip on the Metro back into Virginia to have a look at the Pentagon and The National 9/11 Pentagon Memorial.

Pretty amazing place – the biggest office building in the world, with 17 miles of corridors, five sides, five stories, five ‘rings’. We’d had a good view of it from 500-foot up the Washington Monument yesterday but it was good to get up close.

The Memorial is rather beautiful, in an elegant, simple way – 184 ‘benches’, set out in rows according to the birth year of the victim, orientated to either face the Pentagon if they were on the Flight 77, or away from it if they were in the building; 59 of the former, 125 of the latter.

Perhaps most moving is the presence of the five first benches, separated from the rest by quite a gap, representing the five children who were on the plane – sisters of 3 and 9 years old, and three 11-year-olds.

Having listened to the audio tour and had our moments of reflection, we went back to the hotel and picked up our stuff, got back on the Metro and went to Union Station to catch the train to New York City.

Got there a bit early and so spent an hour reading the news and stuff, then went out to get on the train to find it absolutely pouring with rain. We’ve been really lucky with the weather so far – very little rain apart from when driving, and managed to avoid the tornado affecting large parts of the country not far from us. Checking the weather once the train got going we found that an inch of rain had fallen in DC in 30 minutes while we were happily sitting in the station, and that there was a major weather warning for the area between Washington and Baltimore – exactly where the train was going! Didn’t affect us, but it was pretty wild out there.

Arrived safely at Penn Station in NYC and managed to negotiate the subway during rush hour with all our luggage – not fun, but we did it – and found our way to Tan & Dan’s awesome apartment on 72nd Street. Spent a lovely evening catching up and planning the next week, half of which will be spent up state and the other half cramming as much as we can into three days in NYC.