I woke up around 10:30 feeling like complete crap. My entire body hurt, I had a headache and couldn’t stop coughing. I was really concerned that if this is how I felt after day 1 then I’m probably going to drop dead about day 5… Ken and his friend Chris were outside in his garage working on building a bike frame, so I grabbed some coffee and a double dose of Airborne and chatted with them about bikes for about an hour of so. The rest of the guys woke up at some point and we decided to hit the road at about 1:30. It takes about 35 minutes to get to D.C. from Ken’s place and I was really hoping that we would miss most of the traffic heading in and out of the city. We ended up completing the full Air & Space Museum tour (we had visited the Hangar last time, near Dulles Airport). I made sure to see the Wright Brother’s Plane and one of the few remaining bicycles the Wright Brothers made before moving to the flying machine business. I also visited the Apollo exhibit where they had the moon rocks and a good deal of the other supplies and artifacts from the Apollo 11 and later missions. A nice little surprise was some of Goddard’s rockets right at the entrance. We also scored by seeing some American Culture Artifacts, the highlights for me was John Coltrane’s A Love Supreme lead sheet, the ENIAC computer, the R2D2 and C3PO models, Louis Armstrong and Dizzy’s trumpets, and the Puffy Shirt.
After leaving the Smithsonian, we drove around trying to find a place for the other guys to eat; as I am doing my best to not buy any food and try and survive on what I brought as much as possible. Since we were driving around at rush hour, there was (of course) no parking, so we decided to just drive to the Red and the Black. Fortunately, I’m getting a pretty good idea of how D.C. is laid so it was very easy to find the venue. We again, had to kill some time, so Pat and Trav went to find some food and Mike and I just chilled out at the bar. We watched Ninja Warrior, which was amazingly awesome and then we watched some old-school American Gladiators (and all of the Gladiators’ feathered hair). Anne, the bartender, was totally awesome and kept us entertained while we waited to set up. As I had expected, the show was much better and I also quite enjoyed The BreakUps, who had played after us. We drove back to Ken’s place and made plans for the 10 hour drive to Indianapolis for our session at WEEM in the afternoon as well as the gig that evening.