Washington Adventure: Part Two

After leaving the Library of Congress we headed next door to the Supreme Court Building. What an amazing site it was. How many country changing decisions have been made in this building. Quite awe inspiring. From there we headed to the Museum of American Indians which was at the top of our children's list of must see places. We had a wonderful lunch at their food court which has an amazing assortment of Native American cuisine. It is divided into regions...some of our samples included salmon, native american tacos, indian fry bread and of course for our more picky eaters...chicken and fries!! After lunch we toured around the exhibits which detail the lives of American Indians today as well as a lot of their history. There was a neat bead work exhibit as well as pottery and indian dolls. Next we headed for the Air and Space Museum which is right next door thankfully. Robert was thrilled about seeing all of the different treasures that this museum had to offer as were the boys. I have to admit though that the girls and I were pooped! We decided to let the boys explore and we went to McDonald's for a shake and some fries and some nice chairs. After some rest we rejoined our boys and Emma went with them to some of the other exhibits including the Wright Brother's area which was a favorite with all of them. Ana and I ended up camping out on the floor to people watch and Ana took a much needed cat nap. This rounded out our first day of touring. The one down side to the day was when we got back to the van we realized it had been broken into while we were gone. Thankfully my sweet husband was very smart and took pretty much everything out of any value and they only ended up taking four of the kids DVDs. One of them being Bible Man so we are hopeful that perhaps they will watch it and repent!! We filed a police report and headed for the camp ground...exhausted.

The Supreme Court
My weary kiddos at Air and Space...in front of the Spirit of St. Louis

After our adventure with the van we decided to take the Metro for our second day of touring. We were off and running to the first bus of the day which took us to the Metro station and on to downtown. Our first stop of the day was the National Archives which we were all excited about seeing. Since we have been studying early American history and specifically the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution this was thrilling for all of us. We spent some time looking over all the documents and snapping a lot of photos and then moved onto the gift shop! We found lots of treasures including copies of all the important documents and a copy of Poor Richard's Almanack for me written by Benjamin Franklin. Another person we had studied extensively last year.

Outside the National Archives

Next we headed to the Naval Museum. Peter especially enjoyed this spot looking at all the Naval uniforms and getting more info about a tour of duty of a naval officer in a very interesting film. We hit the Hard Rock Cafe for lunch and then went to see the house where Lincoln died. Ford's Theater across the street is closed for renovation but we did see the outside of it. Next we walked to the White House and then over to the monuments. We were able to see the Washington, WWII, Vietnam and our personal favorite...Lincoln. We have been reading a photo biography about him since we returned from our trip and it is great to have the visual of the places that he lived and worked fresh in our minds.

After the monuments we trudged back to the subway, very weary but happy to have seen so much of this amazing city. Hopefully we will be able to go back again someday and see some of the things we missed, but we feel like for our first trip we saw the main highlights...memories we will have for a life time!

A nice view of the White House from over by the Washington Monument.