Washington DC – Part 2

Did you know that the stone in the Washington Monument is two different colors?

 

Just a note: this entry was WHILE we were in Washington, DC back in May! It appears we have confused some of our readers!

The Cherry Hill RV Park has a “dog walking” service available. For a small fee a person will come to your RV and give your pet two “potty breaks” and a 20 minute walk while you see the sites of Washington. If need be they will even feed your pet for you. Knowing  that Raider was being well cared for we spent 10 hours one day and two 12 hour days seeing as many sites as possible. We opted for a Gray Line Tour called “Open Top Sightseeing Tour”

We opted for a Gray Line Tour called “Open Top Sightseeing Tour”.

This tour included a very nice courteously bus to take us into and out of Washington each day and allows for an unlimited number of hop on or hop off stops over a two day period.  This allowed us to see much more of Washington than we could have on foot and got us out sight seeing much earlier than the public bus and  Metro ride into Washington did.

So what did we see? We visited 4 of the Smithsonian museums: the National Air and Space Museum, the National Art Gallery, the American History Museum, the Natural History Museum and the Smithsonian Castle. One of the  most amazing things we found out is that all of the Smithsonian Museum are FREE!

The Smithsonian Castle, headquarters for the Smithsonian

We visited the Washington Monument

Work began on the Washington  Monument in early 1848, but it wasn’t completed until December of 1884. Due to a 25 year halt in construction. Because they used 2 different quarries for the stone, before and after the construction halt, the stones are two different colors. The history of the construction of the Washington  Monument is a very interesting story follow this link to read it: Washington Monument Construction.

We saw the White House

This is the Oval Office. I think that if you look real close you can see President Obama waving to the camera. ;-)

We saw National Cathedral

We took a ride down Embassy Road

We visited the Lincoln Memorial:

We visited the Vietnam War Memorial:

Both the Jefferson Memorial and the FDR Memorial were closed for repair.

We toured the Capitol Building:

 

 

We also visited the National Archives and saw the actual Declaration of Independence and the actual Constitution. No pictures are permitted and the  light level is kept very low. The Declaration of Independence still looks in pretty good condition, but the ink on the Constitution as faded badly.

Other sites we visited include:

The Supreme Court building

The Library of Congress Build

The slideshows has many more pictures of our visit to Washington