I have a 5 hour layover at Dulles airport in Washington DC next Sunday morning. Is there something I could see outside the airport in that time?
Sadly, Dulles is an expensive cab ride from anyplace you would want to visit and a good hour away from DC. Nothing you could see for three hours there is worth the nearly $100 cab ride. Maybe dinner and a movie in nearby Herndon…?
How about this?
The Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center near Washington Dulles International Airport is the companion facility to the Museum on the National Mall. The building opened in December, 2003, and provides enough space for the Smithsonian to display the thousands of aviation and space artifacts that cannot be exhibited on the National Mall. The two sites together showcase the largest collection of aviation and space artifacts in the world.
I’ve moved the OP from General Questions to IMHO.
Just for your info, the Udvar-Hazy Center is open on Sunday from 10:00 to 5:30. It’s about 2 miles from Dulles airport. There is a shuttle bus you can take. I don’t know times.
A cab ride is probably about $15-20 one way.
The Udvar-Hazy Center is the only thing I’d suggest, failing that, a visit to Dulles Town Center - not a ton to do there but it’s a reasonable mall complex.
Yes, the Udvar-Hazy Center is terrific.
Yipes - $10/mile??
Think of it more like 50 cents per minute.
The traffic can be insane. There are times of day when that trip can easily take 30 minutes.
Sounds like walking is a much better plan.
I assume you’re joking, but just in case you’re not, that’s impossible and extremely unsafe. It’s highway the whole way (and according to google its 5.3 miles).
The summer that the Udvar-Hazy Center first opened, I flew down from Boston just for a day there. (Independence Air had just come into being, the fare was pretty cheap.) There was no shuttle bus at the time, though. I don’t recall what the cab fare was. Part of the reason for building the U-HC was to put it on the airport grounds, so planes could land and taxi right to the museum. I wonder if they’d let the shuttle bus take the taxiways to avoid the road traffic. Anybody wanting to see the museum might appreciate seeing the airport from the airplane side of things.
(Great museum; planes you’ll never see anywhere else. Kind of a frustrating day, though. Some protesters sprinkled ashes on the Enola Gay and they evacuated the place for more than an hour. I didn’t have anyplace else to go.)
Well, I came in here to say Udvar-Hazy center but it looks like that’s pretty well covered; however, I’ll add that it’s free - publicly funded as are the rest of the Smithsonian museums. There are some other things (flight simulators, IMAX, an observation tower) that cost money but just seeing the aircraft is free.
I popped in to mention the Udvar-Hazy Center as well. It’s quite near Dulles. I don’t know though whether there’s a shuttle from the airport, however (I know there’s one from the main Air and Space museum down town).
It is definitely worth a visit and sounds like it’s exactly the right thing for your jaunt, depending on the timing.
If you do take a cab there, get the phone number for the cab company. There won’t be taxis waiting at the museum, so you’ll need to call for one when it’s time to go back to the airport.
I stand corrected, there is a shuttle bus:
http://www.nasm.si.edu/visit/transportation/airports.cfm