Washington DC

---

DAY 28
As we were all packed the night before, we just had to eat breakfast, shower and throw out all of the food and plastic bowls we’d been carrying around with us. After we picked up the car from valet we headed out to the airport about 7.30am as the car needed to be back by 8am. We had run the fuel down pretty low as we’d paid for a full tank when we picked it up. We thought we’d have enough fuel to get to the airport as the info system said we had about 50 miles left and it was only 12km to the airport. However, when we finally got to where the car rental place was meant to be - it wasn’t there anymore and the car had gone through a few different warnings on how low the fuel was. I was starting to panic that we would run out of fuel in peak our in the middle of the road. We then realized we had 2 addresses for the rental place and the first address must have been outdated. We plugged in a petrol station into the GPS and i was really panicking that we wouldn’t make it. Again, another lot of bad luck - the petrol station was no longer there!! Luckily about 500metres up the road was another one and we put $5 in just to get us to the car rental return. Finally, we found where we were meant to be - it was a little weird as all the car rental returns are in a giant carpack with a different company on each level. You just drive the car up to your level, drop it off, get your stuff out and collect your receipt. Very odd. We then headed out to the airport shuttle to take us over to the terminals. We found where we were meant to be - American Airlines Domestic and we even managed to do a self check in. This process was simple enough, but we did have to pay $50 to check our baggage and it had to be less than 50 pounds. The self check in prints your boarding pass and your receipt. Once you did the self check in, there is no counter just a woman walking around who calls your name, then puts your bag on the scales. Scott’s was under and of course mine was over by about 2 pounds. I then had to take out 2 pounds of stuff and put it in our carry on. My bag got weighed again and it was OK. We will definitely have to do a better effort next time as i’m sure we will buy stuff in Washington DC, New York and Niagara Falls. We should be right out of Mexico as we are international passengers and we are then allowed 32kg. Once our bags got tagged we then had to walk over to the baggage area and hand our bags to a guy who put them on a conveyor belt. We then started the process of going through security. We had to line up and hand over passport and boarding pass. Then we had to take off shoes, belts and anything else that would set off the machine. We had to take the laptop out of the bag and put it in a tub of its own and then walk through the screener. We got through no dramas thankfully. However, we will make sure we are super early at each airport as if you get held up at all then could miss your flight.
We are now sitting in the airport terminal waiting for our flight which boards in about an hour. We tried a coffee from starbucks, I had a pumpkin spice and Scott had toffee mocha and they were really nice actually. We should arrive in Washington DC at around 2.45pm and hopefully get to the hotel by about 4pm. I booked a DC by nights tour whilst waiting to board the plane for tonight and it includes hotel pick up which is good. The flight was uneventful and left on time. Just like home if you want food you need to buy it. Landed fine, got our baggage and grabbed a taxi from the BWI - Baltimore International Airport. The taxi driver on the way to the hotel was a little crazy, he went pretty fast and was weaving in and out of traffic. On the plus side though, we got to the hotel pretty quick. The drive was nice as we passed a lot of areas with autumn trees and lots of orange and yellow leaves - very pretty. It was an expensive ride - $100, and as I soon learnt BWI is not the closest airport there is one like 12 min away which we are flying out of on Sunday thankfully.
Once we checked in to hotel we headed out for a walk to the National Mall, which is where all the Smithsonian Museums, Capitol building and national monuments. The first thing we noticed once we got to the National Mall was the area being set up for “Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear”, which is a big A-Political Rally being held by John Stewart and Steven Colbert. We only just found out that it was being held, so will be pretty cool to see. It kicks off at 12pm and goes until 3pm and they are expecting 300,000 people. We then walked up to the Capitol building to get some photos - you can’t go in unless you have organised tours, so we just got some cool pics.
We walked back to the hotel to grab some dinner at about 5.30am as we didn’t lunch. Dinner was nice and quick and we headed back to our room to look up a few things in DC. We headed downstairs for our 7pm pick up for our night tour. The bus was on time and it was decked out pretty cool - like an old tram and had glass windows the whole way around. We stopped by Union Station to pick up the rest of the people and there were so many people lined up. They do tonnes of tours each night. Our tour guide was Vince and he was really informative and had a real passion for the city and its history. We did a few loops of the Capitol building and heard about the zero curse - which is sometimes used to describe the pattern where from 1840 to 1960 each American President who had won election in a year ending in zero (such as 1880 or 1900) died in office. It was broken by Ronald Reagan, who survived being wounded in a March 1981 shooting, and George W. Bush who finished his two terms.
The curse, first widely noted in a Ripley's Believe It or Not book published in 1931, began with the death of William Henry Harrison, who died in 1841 after having been elected in 1840. For the next 120 years, presidents elected during years ending in a zero (occurring every 20 years) ultimately died while serving in office, from Harrison to John F. Kennedy (elected 1960, died 1963).
The name "Curse of Tippecanoe" derives from the 1811 battle. As governor of the Indiana Territory, William Harrison bribed Native Americans to cede their lands to the U.S. government and handed out whiskey, causing problems for the Indians. These hostile acts angered the Shawnee chief Tecumseh, and brought government soldiers and Native Americans to the brink of war in a period known as Tecumseh's War. Tecumseh and his brother organized a defensive group of Indian tribes designed to resist white westward expansion. In 1811, Harrison successfully attacked Tecumseh’s village along the Tippecanoe River, earning fame and the nickname "Old Tippecanoe". Harrison strengthened his reputation even more by defeating the British at the Battle of the Thames during the War of 1812. Tecumseh's brother Tenskwatawa, known as the Prophet, supposedly set a curse against Harrison and future White House occupants who became president during years with the same end number as Harrison.
We drove past a lot of monuments and buildings of interest including - Washington Monument, Botanic Gardens, Kennedy Centre, FBI building, treasury building, reserve building, trade building, navy monument, Franklin Roosevelt monument, Arlington cemetery, the Ford theatre where Lincoln was shot and the house where he died, the White House, some Art Museums, Holocaust Museum, the Mint and i’m sure lots more that i can’t remember!
We got to stop at a few places, the first being the Jefferson memorial where we had about 20minutes to get out and take photos. Next stop where we got to get out was the Iwo Jima Monument which is a really cool monument which represents when the US soldiers had won that battle in Japan. It is a huge monument and is quite powerful. We also got to see parts of the Arlington Cemetery at this stop. The last stop was the Lincoln Memorial which was quite large and similar in shape/style to the Kennedy building. The reason the building are so similar in design is because the 2 presidents have a lot of eerie things in common. I won’t go into them all, but Google it there are tonnes of weird co-incidences. We had a fair amount of time at the Lincoln memorial, as we also got to see the Vietnam Vet’s memorial and the Korean war veterans memorial.
The tour finished up around 10.30pm and we couldn’t believe how many people were still out and about in the city doing tours. Even a lot of the monuments didn’t close until after 10pm as they were still doing ranger talks at 10pm. Definitely very pretty city at night and we were stoked with the tour - look em up Old Town Trolley Tours. After we got dropped off at the hotel, we pretty much headed straight to bed as we have an early start tomorrow.

---

Comments

[Mum]

Time is flying!!!
We are obviously sadly lacking in memorial statues here in Australia or more likely, we do not notice them. Great looking buildings, amazing how many do night tours and so late, very different. Looks awesome. Luv ya Mum