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.
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