Once the doors opened up I got in line and was able to score a ticket to the first tour of the day (they are free). Since I had time to kill before the tour (9 a.m.) I read through the exhibits I'd missed the day before and had a little bit of breakfast. The tour was pretty interesting and the tour guide was hilarious. They take you through a few different buildings and give you some interesting history to the place. It was sort of electrifying to think of the great decisions that had been made here and the people who had once sat there. Both the constitution and the declaration of independence were signed in Liberty Hall.
After the tour I headed back to the hostel to collect Leann and our bags and go find the Philadelphia Museum of Art which is where Rocky actually ran up the steps and the Rocky statue is outside the grounds. The GPS did a great job of getting us there and we ran up the steps ourselves and took pictures with the statue.
There was also a really neat water fountain with a statue of George Washington in front of the museum that we took pictures of.
Getting out of Philly sucked it big time. Apparently the road we were on is a major artery to the art museum as well as the zoo and everyone and their dog was trying to get to those places. It probably took us more than 20 minutes to go maybe a mile. Once we were on the freeway we made good time though and got into D.C around 11. I dropped Leann off at her hotel and made it over to my brother's hotel to pick him up and then we headed into VA where our hotel was. After getting settled in we caught the metro into the city. The entrance to the metro is this long escalator ride deep into the pits of hell which I thought was pretty cool.
After we got off the metro we headed straight to the Smithsonian museum of natural history. Our first stop was the restaurant as we were both starving and after paying our arm and leg we had a fine meal. We probably spent 2-3 hours in the museum, wandering from room to room. They have this neat 'life on earth' timeline that you follow as you walk through the museum with lots of modern animals, extinct animals, and dinosaur skeletons. They also have a really need room with precious stones and just a bunch of different minerals from mines around the world.
We really didn't have a plan on where to go next so we wandered toward the capital building, into a sculpture garden, and stumbled upon the National Archives. Since it didn't look too busy we decided we'd go see our famous documents. Standing outside in the heat was terrible...it was in the mid 90's with probably 80% humidity so the ice cream lady was making a killing. Once inside we saw an introductory video and then stood in line for maybe half an hour before getting to see the documents. Some of the documents were in way better shape than others but it was still pretty cool to see these originals and think back to the climate of the day and how brave and forward thinking these people were.
Next up was the Washington monument. I later learned that the reason it's called the Washington monument and not memorial is that construction was begun while he was still alive. Since the Lincoln memorial is just a little bit further down the mall we headed there next. Before you get to the reflecting pond there is a WWII memorial with some beautiful fountains that we stopped to take pictures of. At the other end of the reflecting pond is the Lincoln memorial which was probably my favorite thing to see in D.C. Lincoln was such a force and his untimely death was a tragedy for the American people. It gave me tingles to sit there and thing of all that he had accomplished and what he stood for.
Since we still didn't have much of a plan we just sort of wandered around. We saw the back side of the White House and some older administrative buildings and then found ourselves some dinner at this good pizza place. Since we were both pretty beat we just found our way back to the hotel and called it a night.
Washington Pics
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