We'd heard a rumour that Gator Girl's bridesmaid, Aussie Bruce, would be passing through her parents place in Washington on a world wide rock star tour. So we thought we'd take the opportunity to check out the monuments on the Saturday and Sunday, and spend the Monday with Bruce and her family
Gator Girl left it up to me to organise the hotel, which is either an excellent or terrible idea depending on whether I'm feeling lavish on the day I book. Luckily for her, I was feeling rich and booked a beautiful hotel in downtown Washington, right near the White House.
We arrived late Friday night into the Reagan airport, flying just past the Pentagon and directly at the white house..... By the time we got to our hotel, we only had a short period of time to check out the skyline. We took lots of pictures of the impressively lit city, but the only one which came out well was the cheese stick (also known as the Washington monument).
Washington is very pretty, very clean city. It's also the first city which seems to be designed for people, rather than cars. There's actually crosswalks with pedestrian lights, which would be a massive step forward for most of the southern cities we've been in so far. It's also set out very well, with wide streets designed so that you can see monuments in the distance. For example, from the white house you can see the capitol (basically parliament) building and the washington monument, from the monument you can see the capitol, white house and the reflecting pool leading up to the giant Abe (picture of that lower down). And between all of these areas were large expanses of grass where people seem free to just hang out. I haven't seen so much public space since I came to the US, and the city is much the better for it.
Standing betweent the Washington monument with the capitol building in the background. To the right is one of the funkier looking buildings that makes up the Smithsonian museum. The Smithsonian is not, as I thought, just a single building, but an entire neighbourhood of museums, each building dedicated to a different historical aspect. More on that later.
This picture is taken from the same spot, looking back the other way towards the cheese stick. By the way, although the day looks very sunny, the massive thick coat that Gator Girl is wearing should give you a good hint that it was pretty chilly out there. However given it was the middle of winter, this is probably to be expected.
This is taken from the opposite side of the stick, looking across the reflecting pool back towards the stick. Directly at our back is the giant Abe. These three pics are all in a direct line, I think showing pretty well the wide, grassy nature of the city. Purty.
Pretty much every US president seems to have some kind of monument, and how good they were as a president appears to be related to how big the monument is. So you can see Washington's from everywhere, Lincoln's & Jefferson's from a lot of the city, whereas I didn't see Bush's or Reagan's anywhere. Probably the most impressive was Lincoln's, which was made up of a giant Abe statue with his famous speeches on either wall. I think the three pics above give it the right epic scale.The final thing we did at the end of the Saturday was go up the cheese stick and take some shots of the city, which are worth sharing. They told us lots of reasons why the cheese stick is the largest something something of it's type, but I wasn't really interested so stuck to taking photos of the scenery. I mean, come on, if it's not the largest building around, just get over it and stop trying to make it the 'biggest' something.
The first picture looks south towards the Potomac river. The big white building on the side of the lake is the Jefferson memorial (I think, I lose track of all the memorials occasionally).The second picture is looking east towards the Capitol. Pretty much all the buildings on either side of the grassed area are part of the Smithsonian.
The picture on the left shows the view to the west, looking across the reflecting pool to the giant Abe statue. The fountains in the foreground are for the WW2 memorial.
The picture on the right is the view to the north, towards the White House. Again, check out all those cool large lawns.
On the Sunday we explored the Smithsonian. We spent a while at the national archives, which was a fairly patchy affair. The exhibit didn't really seem to have a theme, there were just bits of history scattered everywhere. However it was salvaged by the final exhibit, which was the declaration of independance, the constitution and the bill of rights. I was unable to get close enough to see if there was a hidden map on the declaration unfortuantely. The one thing that did strike me was the massive size of John Hancocks signature on all of there documents. He has signed his name about 3 times the size of anyone else. Obviously a man with some issues.
We then spent pretty much of the rest of the day in the air and space museum, and could have spent longer. They had exhibits and planes from the very beginning of flight, through to live feeds from the space station. Very cool......especially for a geek like myself.
On the Sunday night we went into Virginia and caught up with Aussie Bruce's parents. We had a great dinner, and the next morning we went to the riverside old suburb of Alexandria, which was very impressive. Again it was very pedestrian friendly, with lots of cobbled old streets and old shotgun houses.
Aussie Bruce with her temporarily borrowed dog (8 years and still counting). Check out the wonderful weather again, considering it was winter we couldn't ask for better.
Bruce's Mum, Bruce and Gator Girl on the streets on Alexandria. All the streets looked a lot like this - wide footpaths and old buildings.
And then unfortunately it was time to head back to Reagan airport and back down to Louisiana again. Overall we had a great weekend, and I recommend checking out Washington if you ever get the chance.
