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Hi,
The Hotel is awesome; we got up early and took a taxi to the Holocaust Museum. Pam & Julia stayed in line and Heidi & Rylan walked over to the Washington Monument and stood in line and got tickets to go up around 12:30pm then walked back to the Holocaust Museum where the others were. At 10am we went into the Museum and learned tons, Julia said “Grandma my heart is heavy.” Which completely describes how we all felt; it was very sad what had happened.
We then went to the Washington Memorial, took pictures and got in another line. In Washington D.C., every building anyone pretty much goes into has security and a security checkpoint that you get scanned and so does your stuff. The guards get pretty grouchy if you do anything wrong, but you think that you didn’t know you had to do a certain thing because you had never been there before, but it is you the guest that has to have patience or you don’t go in, period. Well, once inside the Memorial it took 70 sec. to go up to the top, where we took pictures and could see a long ways into
the distance. It took two minutes to go down in the elevator because the elevator slowed and the lights turned off and we saw through the glass the donation plaques made of stone from those who contributed money to help finish the monument long ago.
We caught a double Decker bus, where we paid a flat fee to ride it all day, getting on and off. We went then to the Pentagon parking lot where we were told not to even take pictures or raise our hands in the act of taking pictures, we drove along the north, west, and south west side of the Pentagon. We saw the new brick where the rebuild had been done since 9-11.
We then saw Arlington National Cemetery and the front of Robert E. Lee’s old Mansion.
We continued on to the National Archives were we stayed 5th in line with full bladders for a long time, willing the guards to let us in. We saw the Declaration of Independence, the Bill of Rights and the Constitution in the Rotunda which had the lights down and had security that was unbelievable. The Declaration was very faded, very hard to read
the words. The Constitution you could read and it did say that, as per Pam, “you have to be a citizen of the United States to be President. So Obama needs to prove it or leave.” We went to the gift shop and bought copies of these documents and other nick knacks.
The Library of Congress was next, and to get there we walked through the rain, the kids complained they were getting wet, we joked that it was good they weren’t in Europe. We had to walk through the Capitals’ grass and around to the back and got to see it there and took pictures. We were too late to go into the Library but we took lots of pictures and then went back to the hotel where the kids swam and I crashed in a pool chair for 45 mins, I didn’t know I had fallen asleep till I woke. We called it a night after that and I was the first one asleep.
-Heidi
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Barbara
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This even helps me learn, I can't even imagine what these kids are learning.