Advertisement
Capitol Building Visitors Center
The plaque outside the Capitol Building's Visitor Center. Monday, 8 June (D.C. Day 2): Again, we took the KOA shuttle into D.C., although it left a bit late this time. The first thing we did was to see about a tour of the Capitol Building. We were having difficulty locating the ticket office when a guy pulled up in a big golf cart with 3 bench seats. After telling him what we were looking for, he told us to climb aboard and he’d take his there. Cool! Unfortunately, when we go there, the line for “walk ups” was quite long. I guess we should have made reservations somehow, maybe thru our congressman. Anyways, we decided not to wait and instead headed to the Postal Museum. We left the Capitol Building thru the Library of Congress tunnel and ended up spending some time there looking around. What a lavish, beautiful place inside! We then went to the Postal Museum and spent some time looking at the cool exhibits about U.S. Postal history, with the different trucks, stagecoaches, mailboxes and even planes and train cars they used. We sent a special post card using two machines, one for the free post card after entering the address on the touch screen, then
Library of Congress
Manoli posing on one floor of the beautiful Library of Congress. another that cost 28 cents to add postage and send it. We also saw the package that some jeweler used in 1952 to send the then one million dollar Hope Diamond thru the mail to the Smithsonian Institute. Really! He used over 140 dollars in postage, mostly to insure it! By this time, it was lunch time and we’d decided to eat at the Museum of the American Indian’s cafeteria. Manoli had a plate of yucca fries and a cup of turtle soup. I had a cup of wild fennel soup, a purple and white potato salad called Huancinea or some such, and a small plate of lobster, oyster mushrooms, and barley salad. Everything was very tasty and cost about $23.00 with a juice drink. From there, we walked to the Museum of American History and spent quite a bit of time there and only saw a small part of it all. Checking the time, we realized that we didn’t have much time left before we had to head back for the shuttle, so we walked to the White House area for a photo, then hustled back to the shuttle. Today, we only used the Tourmobile once, and had to
Supreme Court
The Supreme Court Building. wait 45 minutes vs. the supposed 20 to 25 minutes. I’d not recommend the Tourmobile based on our experience, since we waited a long time 2 or 3 times and only used it sparingly. If you think you need the transportation (with small kids, or old folks), or just want a nice tour to get familiar with the place, try the open-top or double-decker tour busses, since they seemed to run a lot more often. After returning to the KOA, I picked up dinner at Arby’s and we took care of the nightly routines of reading and posting this travel blog and photos. Tomorrow we head to the Philadelphia/West Chester KOA for a three night stay. See ya there!
Advertisement
Tot: 0.054s; Tpl: 0.009s; cc: 13; qc: 26; dbt: 0.0301s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1mb