D.C. Trip Part 2

*Just so you know, this post is extremely long, so read at your own risk.

So our second day in D.C. was probably the best. We woke up pretty early (for us) and walked to the metro. Once we got further into the city, we had a familiar and wonderful breakfast at Starbucks. As anyone who has ever eaten with me before can attest, I eat slow. Like, really slow. So Kath got a simple muffin, but since I was hungry, I got a sandwich and chips. So after Kath waited for two hours for me to finish, we got our day underway. First we went to the tourist shop and got some souvenirs. Just around the corner from that was the Ford theater and the house where Lincoln died. 

The House

Ford's theater across the street

Ford's theater

Another view of the house

Since the lines to get into both were super long, we just took some pictures from the outside and then we rode out to the capital to see the Library of Congress.

The Library was seriously my favorite place. 

The fountains out front were amazing!

The inside of the Library

So we went on a tour of the library and the lady told us about how Jefferson donated his whole library after a fire destroyed a lot of it, and showed us the different details in the floor and ceiling. There were so many crazy things everywhere you looked.

The ceiling. Note the stained glass skylights.

Original tiling that was still intact

artwork everywhere!

This is the room where the actual books are, but we couldn't go in, so we just stared at everyone in there through the glass like a zoo. It was weird. I wanted to go inside so bad though. Remember the scene from National Treasure, where Nic Cage is like running all around in there?

Ah, such a stupid, yet entertaining film

The seal of each state was on those windows

Books!

I got a picture of Botany:)

View of the capital outside the window

Replica of a really old bible

My favorite place:)

Pretty compass on the floor

Jefferson himself



Cancer:) The astrological signs were everywhere

More of the stained glass

Gemini

When we were in there, we also went to an exhibit of Jefferson's personal library they had on display, also another display on discovering the Americas, and they had some really cool artifacts from Central America.

There's me!

So that was our adventure...

We went and snapped a few pictures at the Capital as well

Me...

Kathleen

Next we went over to the Supreme Court. Pretty.

Kathleen

Me

So, fun story. As I was posing there in front of the building, I wasn't paying attention and right as Kath was snapping some pics, I fell off the first step. hahaha.

So after all the good times around those parts, we got back on the metro and went over to Arlington cemetery. As we were walking in, we kind of got swept up in this tour group, and the leader dude was pretty interesting, so even though we weren't officially part of them, we kept close, and by the end they probably thought we were stalking them... Creep Masters Fotheringham at your service.



This guy was a famous boxer. Pretty cool.

Unknown soldier grave. We watched the guards change. It was really impressive.

Amphitheater behind the grave

This guy was in a ton of wars.

Kathleen at this pretty mini amphitheater place

Grave of unknown soldiers of the Civil War

View of the city from the top

Kennedy family graves

So after Arlington, Kathleen was determined we walk across the giant bridge that crosses the Potomac river. At this point, after walking all over yesterday and all day, our feet were just about dead... but we did it. We walked all the way over the river, and it was really gorgeous. Even though I wanted to die, I'm glad we did it. Once across, we decided to go to the Lincoln memorial again since it was right there.

wow. That is actually a pretty disturbing picture. Sorry.

Next, we decided to try to get to all the other memorials we hadn't gotten to.

Korean War Memorial. I loved this one! The statue soldiers were so haunting.

Vietnam Memorial.

So, here's the thing about me and vacation pictures. I just don't give a d***. Take the above for instance. I just snap a picture, and there's like people posing and wandering by, and it's blurry and kinda crooked. And I just can't bring myself to care too much. Like, I know I'll always remember it, so I don't take good pictures... Sorry. Kathleen is much better at it then me.

More of the Vietnam memorial. It was really haunting as well.

We didn't get to the Jefferson memorial, because our feet literally were about to die. So after these memorials we wandered back to the city, grabbed some hot dogs and then took the metro home.

Kathleen doing a sexy/exhausted pose. There's a story behind this one. The day before we saw this old couple posing in front of this old gatehouse, and the lady was doing this weird sexy pose... Like in front of this gate house? It was so weird. Kathleen recreated the scene, and she'll probably kill me for posting this.. and is this too long a caption?

Once we got off at our stop, we decided to get some cake at this restaurant. It was pretty good cake... but terrible service. Like we weren't really in a hurry to walk again, but it took ages... ugh.
The next day we were due to leave, so we packed up, checked out, and headed back out. We wanted to walk kinda like this.

It was Kathleen's birthday this day, so we decided to celebrate with breakfast in the city. But as we got off our first metro, Kath realized her metro card was missing. We had to ride another train back to the bench we were sitting on earlier to find it. Thankfully it was still there, but I was freaking out (big surprise). We went to a crepe place and had some delicious chocolatey things for her birthday which kind of made up for it though. After eating, we stopped at a store to grab some snacks for our flight. We had just bought them and gotten outside, when Kath realized she didn't have her cell phone or wallet, or anything important. This was my face:

Despite my agonizing, all her stuff was just back in the store. She left it on the cracker shelf.... yeah.
We had a few hours before our flight, so we decided to go over to the museums to check out anything we'd missed. Since I already packed my camera, I have no visual documentation of this day.
We went to the museum of natural history first. Luckily they had a coat room where we stored our suitcase. That museum was really fun. Would've been better if our feet worked, but we still had fun looking at all the animals, the giant squid, and mummies.
Next we went over to the American History museum again because there were still a few exhibits we wanted to see. Unfortunately they didn't have a coat room, so I had to wander around with our rolling suitcase the entire time. That was... horrible. But it was totally worth it. We got to see this exhibit of all the First Lady's dresses and china. I loved it. We had lunch there in the museum café, and then we had to go, so we got on the metro and rode over to the airport. We rode a really short flight over to Philadelphia, then we had to wait there for hours before our flight to Salt Lake was ready. Waiting in the airport was so annoying, but I got a lot of reading done. Once our flight was ready, Kath took some drugs and slept the whole time. It was really exciting to see Salt Lake from the air at night. There were tiny fireworks going up all over the place... why on July 6th? Well, because Utah. Emma kindly picked us up, and our adventure came to an end.

I am really glad I finally got to go to D.C. It's been a dream of mine since high school. Kathleen and I actually made perfect traveling companions. Because we are super fast, we got to see a ton of things in only two days. And while I can hold the anxiety of 10 people at once, Kathleen is super chill about things, which meant she could help me calm down most the time, and I could keep us on track. Also, Kath is really good at taking pictures, while I suck. So where I missed some stuff, she got tons of pictures. All in all it was a magical 4th of July, and I hope Kath had a good birthday. Hopefully next year we'll go somewhere else awesome.