Washington D C

9-18 through 9-23

We have spent the last 7 days visiting Washington, D. C. We had previously lived in D C for a year in 1974 and then again in the summer of 1985 and spent a great deal of time exploring the area. Even though we had lived here, it came as a surprise to us as to how beautiful a city it is. We have a lot to be proud of in our nation's capitol.

The Mall area including the Capitol, Washington Monument, Lincoln and Jefferson Memorials were inspiring. We had not previously seen the Vietnam Memorial nor the WW II Memorial. They are beautifully done. It makes you take pause about the sacrifices of our service people.

We visited several museums including the Natural History Museum, Air and Space, Holocaust and attended a talk at the Supreme Court. It was interesting to be sitting in the fairly small room where the Justices actually sit.

One highlight of our visit was the tour of the Library of Congress. The inside of the building with all its paintings and mosaics rivals any building that you see in Europe.

All of the tours and entrances are free and every guide that we had on our tours was excellent. It does take a bit of time to get through all the X rays and security checks. Something that we didn't have to do when we lived here.

We parked our motor home at Cherry Hill CG in College Park, MD. It's advertised as the closest RV park to downtown DC. They are very well set up to give you information on the ins and outs of getting into and exploring DC. There is a bus that takes you to the nearest metro station and then it's about a 35 min ride to downtown. They also have Grey Line tours that pick you up at the CG and take you into town for tours. We chose to drive our car to the College Park metro station because it saved time over taking the city bus. Seniors get a reduced rate to ride the metro and it's fairly simple to use once you figure it out.

We did take one day to drive out to Annapolis and enjoy one of our favorite meals of crab cakes. Just can't beat the Maryland blue shell crabs.

Now that I'm finally caught up with the blog, I will look into posting some pictures. We are having so much fun touring that the blog has taken a back seat.