20th September 2017 - Wednesday

After the effort required yesterday getting to Washington, this sort of worked well to help with our jet lag. I did awake around 4am and struggled to get back to sleep, but we did eventually sleep in until around 8am.

I popped out to get some breakfast from a Starbucks across the street whilst Kathryn got ready. The weather here is going to take some getting used to, it was fairly balmy even at 8am. The forecast was for 30 later on.

We had booked onto a tour at 9:30am, part of the reason we made the effort to get here yesterday. We set off around 9am to walk over the far side of the Capitol building to meet the tour guide.

It was a lovely morning, no need for anything other than a t-shirt and shorts. We made it over to the meet point, and after a slight hesitation to spot the guide, we did find the group. A few people had turned up already, a lady from France, a lady from Minnesota, a young lad from Peru and a couple from Mexico. We set off at 9:30, up the hill to the Capital building.

We learnt a lot from our tour guide about the history of Washington and the first few years of the capital city.  After a quick photo opportunity there, we walked over to the Supreme Court, and then to the Library of Congress. We went into the lobby and heard a lot about the history of the library which was fascinating.. We were then give a short time to explore, including the viewing gallery of the main library.

After that, we used an underground tunnel into the Capital Visitor Centre, which was the end of our walking tour, but we were also given tickets for the official Capital Building tour that started almost straight away.

This started with a brief 10 minutes film covering some more history of the founding of America. We then joined a tour guide on a group of about 20 into the main areas of the building. This included the main rotunda, which is the room with the dome in, the crypt beneath it, and various rooms that housed the original congress and senate before the building was expanded to meet the increase in representatives by the newly joined states.

We finished around 1pm, and were pretty hungry by this point and visit the canteen in the visitor centre. The food was really good, we had some pasta and salad. By the time we left, the skies had cleared and it was a beautiful sunny, and quite hot day.

Kathryn wanted to visit the Air and Space museum and so we walked over there on the other side of the Capitol . We popped into the botanical gardens on the way which was a nice little place.

The Air and Space museum was pretty good, a bit more dated but certainly quite an impressive collection, we just look mainly at the space elements.

After taking several short breaks to rest our feet and drink some water, we walked over to the Natural History museum.

By now it was around 5pm, we started to walk back, with a view in mind to find some food as soon as possible. We headed to some places with ourdoor seating and found a sports bar which fitted the bill perfectly. I had a humungous steak and cheese sandwhich and Kathryn had a turkey, pesto, bacon and avacodo sandwhich. We were totally stuffed by the time we finished and started the walk back to the hotel.

We’ve had an impressive first day, and I think the jet lag is kicking in too so we haven’t done much this evening except watch TV, and get ready for our trip to the zoo tomorrow.