Udvar-Hazy.

No, not the state you enter when you've had too much authentic Czech pilsner to drink. This is the Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center, the National Air & Space Museum's new museum/annex for the display and preservation of historic air and space artifacts. Just opened this week, and it's located near Dulles Airport, outside of Washington. It has the non-space shuttle Enterprise, a Concorde, and an SR-71 Blackbird. It's got the Enola Gay, Mercury and Gemini capsules, biplanes and kit-built airplanes. It's got areas dedicated to commericial aviation, sport aviation, various eras of military aviation, and space craft. There are displays of uniforms, flight (and space) suits, weaponry, and aerial cameras. (And it's named for its major donor.)

I recognized a few of the planes as having previously been on display at the main Air & Space Museum downtown, but most of them were new to me.

There's an IMAX theater (one of the movies being shown is "Shackleton's Antarctic Adventure," which I'm sure is fun to watch, but I'm at a loss to see how it's appropriate for an air and space museum) and a Food Court (which appeared to have only pre-made Subway's sandwiches, not that I paid too much attention because I had another lunch spot in mind). The only real drawback I could see was that while the museum, like all Smithsonian museums, has free entry, they also had a $12 parking fee. Yes, you could drive up to the front and drop someone off without paying the fee, but what will the driver do for the 3 hours that the passengers are in the museum?

The only inexplicable exhibit was the model of the mother ship used in Close Encounters of the Third Kind. While it was kind of cool to get to see it sufficiently close that you could see the little in-jokes that the model builders had put onto it (I spotted a mailbox, a little R2D2, little airplanes, and a graveyard), the exhibit case was just there, in the middle of the "Reaching into Space" area with no justifying explanation. At least when they've had Star Wars- and Star Trek-related exhibits, they've rationalized it with "space fantasy" and "influences on astronauts and engineers".

They're not done filling the "Space" exhibit area yet, and there are a number of exhibit cases that are still empty, so they clearly aren't done with the initial stocking of the museum, and I'll have to go back again in six months.

Oh. Lunch afterwards? The Old Dominion brewpub, not more than 15 minutes down the road. And if they have Tupper's Hop Pocket Ale on their hand pump (as the "Real Ale"), get it.