From the summit site not much happened today. After the closing panels we headed to make some group photos and afterwards exchanged contacts. At about 5pm we ended up in our hotel where we tried to do our first sync-up for ourselfs. I made some notes to keep our main aspects and now leave everyone some time to order his thoughts.

As we had no chance to do some sightseeing yet, we headed over to Washington D.C. at about 9pm then. Matthias from Freifunk in Leipzig had a rental car we could hook up with.

As we were riding down interstate 95 we remembered that the NSA headquarter should be somewhere nearby. Some miles further we found some road signs heading there. As we were kind of in a good mood we immediatly drove there. There was also a visitors center signed out so we took this drive. For sure it was closed on sundays, which i didn’t catch up – we finally ended up in a one way road to some kind of secured entry. As there was no way back we drove to the police man and as he kinda confused asked what we want we responded “Well we wanna see the NSA“. It took him a second but then he responded “But — it’s restricted“. I shortly before starting to laugh responded, “Oh, so can you tell us where to get to Washington then“. He was so kind to give us the road free, to do a u-turn and head back to I95. So, we finally were at the NSA headquarters and also had the chance to do some photos (see Google Earth KML for proof). In reality we had a better view, but we were to feared to use the possibility in front of the policeman. Heading back we also took a step by at NASA Goddard space center where the visitor center was closed too, but we could watch the sun falling while checking out some old rocket models. Andreas indeed, was more impressed by the Antennas. Finally we made our trip to Washington D.C. where we found the Capitol quite easily. We checked out the Washington Memorial, Lincoln Memorial, World War 2 Memorial, Capitol and the White House (which was totally dark – George sleeping?). All in all that was really nice, because it was already late at night it was so silently and it was great to hang out with some really neat people in such a lovely place.

All in all i enjoyed the trip, Columbia was kind of well – seemingless, but for the Summit it was an awesome place. Currently we’re in the flight from Philadelphia to Frankfurt at about 11000 meters going by at the south of Iceland.

My picture sets around the summit can be found here.

After the usual check-in procedure we headed over to our flight to Frankfurt. Arrived in Frankfurt at about 9am we had to do the re-routing of Aarons ticket via Boston. This took quite long and Aaron almost missed the flight to Philadelphia. But he finally catched it and we had a 1 hour delayed start in Frankfurt. Therefor we missed our connection in Philadelphia but a very nice woman of US airways rebooked us for the next flight which was about 2 hours later. Finally we arrived at about 8:30pm in Baltimore and surprisingly our luggage also made it. We headed over to Marriot and had a shower. Befor going to bed we grabbed our first US burger (it’s tradition already ) and felt asleep.