We took a town car from our hotel to downtown Washington. The driver fancied himself the tour guide which was fine with us. We knew nothing having never been to this part of the country or done any research for this unexpected adventure. We didn’t even know what state we were in (Virgina) until we asked.

Instead of just dumping us at the Capitol Hill Building, our driver gave us a tour of the Iwo Jima memorial, Arlington Cemetery, the Pentagon, and told us what else to see. He even let us get out and take pictures at the Iwo Jima statue. It was much bigger than I had expected. (We recently watched Flags of Our Fathers and Letters from Iwo Jima, the latter being much better, so we had some idea what this place was about.) There was nobody at the monument when we got there. As we pulled away a few tour buses showed up with masses of people.

Our driver dropped us off at the Lincoln Memorial. Some workers were blasting high pressure water through fire hoses up Lincoln’s nose when we first got up the stairs.

Next we walked through the Vietnam Memorial Wall area on our way to the White House.

At the White House we made friends with some guys from Norway who gave us some tips about Copenhagen and encouraged us to visit their country too.

From the White House we headed by the Washington Monument and ended up in the Smithsonian Castle. Nothing much to see in there (although the exterior was cool) so we made our way to an art museum with lockers (and an Andy Warhol) to finally put down our luggage for a while.

We finished off our time in DC at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum and the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian before heading to the airport to finally go to Denmark.

Posted on June 27th, 2008 under Other • Tags: Washington D.C.. • RSS 2.0 feed • Both comments and pings are currently closed