Monumental amounts of sightseeing

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Trip Start Dec 26, 2009 Previous
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  Washington DC, District of Columbia
Tuesday, March 23, 2010

Hiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii people,

So you know how we finally made it to DC, because you've been reading the blog (haven't you? HAVEN'T YOU?) and you can probably figure out how tired we were the next day. The 3 hours jetlag was worse than the 12 hours jetlag from Adelaide to Santiago! But we dragged ourselves out of bed, and found maps and bus routes and attractions. Getting on the bus was interesting... we were the only two white people on the bus at any given time over the next couple of days, which was certainly a different feeling! The bus takes about an hour to get into the sightseeing part of DC, as it was the only decent-price accommodation we could find that wasn't booked for the holidays. I really think this is the only year of my life I won't like school holidays! When we finally made it in, emergency Starbucks was required for the energy to keep going.

It was raining as we left Starbucks, much to our astonishment, since we pretty much have the most awesome weather luck ever had by anyone and barely ever get rained on. Except for that time in the Pantanal where we got caught in a tropical lightning storm in a little motorboat. We kept going anyway, mostly because we hadn't caught an hour-long bus just for Starbucks (it's seriously on every corner people, if you put every McDonald's and Burger King and every food chain ever all together, there would still be more Starbucks) and it wasn't raining too badly. But it started coming down harder, and while waiting for a pedestrian crossing to go, Ben said "Wow, it's really coming down." He's banned from saying things like that ever again. The sky obviously takes it as a signal to dump an ocean on us. We weren't far from where we wanted to go, so we raced toward the building... only to be told by the security guard (from inside his nice dry doorway) that the public entrance was right around the other side of this huge building. So we ran all the way around the other side and dived inside, which was pretty useless as I don't think we could have been any wetter. Some hilarious comedian took one look at us inside and went "Oh, is it raining out there?" Maybe just a little bit!!

We had made it to the National Archives, which was nice and dry and therefore more appealing than anything else right then, so we went to see the Declaration of Independence and the original Constitution and the Bill of Rights, as well as an original Magna Carta and lots of other important original documents to do with them. We were mostly dry by the time we were finished, and Ben was all for going back to the motel. Since the rain had lessened, I wanted to keep going - it was forecast to rain the next day as well anyway (which it didn't, at all - weather luck came back). While we were standing in the doorway trying to decide, the rain just stopped. Poof. So we went on!

The problem with DC is although everything you look at is very nice and historical and important and whatever, pretty much all there is to do is walk around looking at nice important historical stuff. And almost all of it is carved stone, and lots of it is carved-stone monuments. We did walk around lots over our 2 days looking at all the nice historical important stuff, but it wasn't actually fun. It was more "oh good we've seen that" in a cross-it-off-the-list sort of way. Maybe we would be more interested if we were American history buffs with an interest in geology. Not that it was bad, just that we've done much more fun things on our trip.

In case you are an American history buff with an interest in geology, we walked around Capitol, went through the Library of Congress (Ben humors my more nerdish desires), went in the Supreme Court (we have a great photo from out the front where the perspective makes Ben look like he's almost as tall as the Supreme Court, check it out), walked down the National Mall to see the Smithsonian Institute and all the art gallery and museum buildings, went past the Whitehouse, and visited the following monuments: the Washington Monument, the WWI monument, the WWII monument (quite impressive actually, lots of fountains and columns and inscriptions), the Korean veteran's monument, the Vietnam veteran's monument, the Vietnam women's monument, and the Lincoln memorial. Which was actually quite good also, only because he is so giant. And if you think we did too many, let me tell you, we skipped piles. And piles and piles. We also skipped the many, many art galleries and museums because they all involved more walking to look at stuff. We like to do stuff.

So consequently we agreed that we'd seen lots of nice stuff and we were glad we'd come and we jumped on a train to New York. We were also possibly less tolerant than usual because we've started a health kick, which means lots of our willpower and tolerance was used up walking past delicious junk food shops to find soups and salads. Ben has not given up his Starbucks venti mocha frappacino habit though.

Monumental amounts of love,
Amanda and Ben

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Post your own travel photos for friends and family More Pictures

Some kind of monument	Capitol	Another kind of monument	Capitol plus Ben's head
Down the National Mall	Capitol 2	Library of Congress	Library of Congress 2
Library of Congress 3	Library of Congress 4	Minerva	Library of Congress 5
Supreme court and enormous Ben	Supreme court	Sculpture Garden	Smithsonian Institute
Washington monument	Back down National Mall	WWII memorial	WWII memorial 2
WWII memorial 3	WWII memorial 4	WWI memorial - slightly smaller	Korean war memorial
Reflectng pool with Washington Monument	Lincoln memorial	Silly Ben	Lincoln
Vietnam vet's memorial	Vietnam women's memorial	Squirrel!!	Whitehouse
Whitehouse 2	Random clock	Chinatown gate	Inside Union Station

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