My friend Anne shows me around the central strip of Washington DC, USA. August 2007.

During my marathon running trip to Antarctica in February this year, I spent 10 days on a boat, the RV Akademik Ioffe, with 100 other like minded people. I made many friends all over the world, and one of them was Anne Bonney from Baltimore.

I took the opportunity to pop over and visit Anne, over the September bank holiday weekend. I flew the quick 7 hours to Dulles airport on a Friday afternoon, and flew back to London on the Monday night. She showed me a whistlestop tour of Baltimore, DC and even a town in Virginia.

On the Sunday we took the metro commuter train into the Washington DC. We emerged from the subway train, onto the national mall which is home to some of the United States most recognisable monuments. I've seen them in so many films, and was very excited to actually be standing there, despite the harsh humidity and warm temperatures.

We walked to the Washington monument which is the tall obelisk. From there we had a great view of everything around, including the capitol building, the white house, the Lincoln memorial and reflecting pool and the Jefferson memorial. We walked down the back of the White house and I gingerly poked my brand new white canon telephoto lens through the railings, whilst trying to avoid a twitchy cop popping a cap in my a**. My late aunty marjorie who died in 2006 left me some amount of money which I put towards my photography hobby, and purchased my new lens, so these pictures are dedicated to her.

Anne and I walked all over the mall, and to the Vietnam, Korea and brand new WW2 memorial.

I was sad to see so many war memorials. I think for me the most poignant was the vietnam memorial, which is manned by volunteers, who can be seen in yellow caps above. They have books, which list each man and woman who died, and they can locate whereabouts on the wall that persons name is.

They also printed out obituaries of people who had died on the anniversary of that week. I read the entry of a few young men, all were under 21 and most had a big smile on their face in dress uniform. They looked so young and were just drafted, and sent off to do as they were told to (click here to see one). I said to Anne, that I hoped there wouldn't be too many more memorials to create; sadly with Afghanistan and Iraq still waging, it was a naive comment for me to make.

After walking to most of the big monuments, we walked to one of the famous Smithsonian institute museum's. We went to the air space museum where I was most eager to see the test shuttle Enterprise, Enola Gay, the Wright flyer, Bell X1 and a U2. Unfortunately, I had misread the wikipedia entry and the shuttle and B29 are located at another museum near Dulles airport. Anne was happy enough though as soon as we picked up some astronaut ice cream anyway.

I had a really nice day, and was pleased to see so much in one day. The light was really quite bad, and it wasn't until later in the afternoon, after we'd left the museum that it finally cleared up and some blue sky appeared. I used two types of film, Fuji Velvia pushed to ISO 100 and Fuji Reala, which has turned out better for the most part. I've fallen out with my canon 350D digital camera as it's not full frame.