Vacation -- Part 4

On Wednesday we took a cab up to the Capital building (that driver was a little weird...and he thought it was totally silly that we had our own chickens), but to get into the visitor center you can't have any type of food or drink. You just had to toss everything in the garbage. And so we decided to head on up to the Library of Congress building. It was so magnificent inside. Like a cathedral almost. We saw a couple of exhibits here while we waited for Ken to finish up his meetings with our congressmen. We saw Thomas Jefferson's personally library. That was cool. After the British burned the White House and Capital his personal library was the new beginning of the National Library.

One exhibit was on Lincoln and it was excellent. The quote I loved from him the most went something like this, "God must really love common people, because he made so many of them." I enjoyed reading through some of Lincoln's personal writings, because it made him more of a real person to me. I guess sometimes I just get surprised because we hear so much about what these great men did, and not so much of how they felt. Poor Mark was dying of boredom at about this point in the trip. Kids can only "look" at so much stuff.

After Ken's meetings we had finished up all our food, but we were a little too late to get the tour of the Capital. So we headed off to the Air and Space Museum.

Ken was really hoping to see the Blackbird, but it ended up being in a different building up by the Dulles airport that we flew into. Oh well. We did watch a pretty interesting movie on the beginning of the flight era. I think the hard part about DC is trying to see the right things. This was totally interesting, but I could watch this sort of show on a PBS station at home so we didn't spend much time here.

Everything in Washington closes so EARLY around 5:30. We hurried over to see the National Archives (something you can't see on TV at home).

You also couldn't use any sort of flash here, and the room was kept quite dark to preserve the documents, so forgive the fuzziness. The lettering on the Declaration of Independence was all but gone.

The Declaration is to the left, the Constitution is the four panels in the middle (between the flags) and the Bill of Rights is in the display just to the right.

When they closed we headed up to Five Guys Burgers. Excluding Grandpa Payne's BBQ, they had the best burgers I've had. We tried their Cajun fries and enjoyed them too. Walking back to the hotel we decided we needed some ice cream and so we turned around and got 4 hot fudge sundaes to go and ate them in our hotel while we took advantage of the cable TV and watched a totally cool show on how things are made.