THE REST OF D.C.

Here are the rest of the pictures from the DC trip.

After the White house, and walking past the hilarious Office of Thrift Supervision,

we walked across the street to the Washington Memorial, which is huge and positioned nicely on the tops of a small hill that looks back over the rest of DC.

The White House is dwarfed in the skyline, and the capital building sits majestically down the road. On the other side, towards the river, sit all the monuments, and flocks of tourists. The building was just too big to get in a single shot on my crappy cell phone, so I didn’t even try. In this particular shot, I tried to time it so that the low-flying jets overhead looks as if they were about to crash into the obelisk, but I snapped it half a a second too late.

The shot you often see, of the reflecting pool mirroring the memorial, is deceptive. Its a good 200 yards between the Washington Monument and the reflecting pool, with the WWII memorial crammed in between. It was a serious trek to get to the other side, and we were already pretty tired. You can see the capitol building way off in the distance where we started.

Directly on the other side of the reflecting pool, however, was the Lincoln Memorial, which Todd insisted we see. You have to remember, Todd is at least a decade older than me, but the cult of celebrity surrounding our 16th president made the poor Illinois boy push ahead.

The Lincoln memorial was clearly the tourist hotspot, and there were at least a hundred people resting on the steps outside the building. Around the corner were a few more monuments, including the Vietnam memorial, which I though was really well designed and quite powerful. I heard one of the park rangers talking about the symbolism of the monument, and how it was turned in as a college project, and revceived a barely passing grade. The other war monuments were less impressive, and we were tired, so we pushed on to see Jefferson, which sat across the bay.

We also walked through the FDR memorial, which is spread out over many buildings, with a half dozen waterfalls and statues of poor, short people lines up outside buildings. There were also several quotes inscribed along the buildings, so I snapped a shot of a good one.

By the time we made it around the bay, we had about 2 hours to walk all the way back to the capitol and catch our train. I snapped a shot of the sunset on the way back.