LEARNING ABOUT Washington DC July 21-23

July 21-23

Oh, my gosh! It is so hot we are dying. Washington DC is having a record heat wave. The temperature is 105 and the humidity is 90%.The kids woke up at the crack of dawn on Thursday, after being awake into the wee hours our arrival night. We had a light breakfast and headed out to get the lay of the land.

First we drove into the Capitol Mall area. We parked and took some pictures of the Capitol Building and then we began to walk along the big grassy Capitol Mall towards the Washington Monument. It was so hot. (102 degrees)

Eventually we got to the Smithsonian Castle, so we went in and took a look at the sampler display of artifacts from the different branches of the Smithsonian. It was nice and cool in the museum and we didn’t want to leave, but finally it was time. We hiked back to the car and headed home. After dinner of hamburgers and watermelon we took showers and hit the sack.

The next day we had tickets for the tour of the Capitol Building, so we got the kids up at 7, although they could have slept much later, I think. After breakfast we got in the car and went back down to the Mall. Grandpa has managed to find good free parking for us every day.

We hurried over to the Capitol only to find big barricades in front of the regal marble staircase. So I asked around and learned that now we had to go all the way to the other side of the building and down some stairs to get to the new Visitor Center. In the meanwhile Grandpa was parking the car and couldn’t understand what I was talking about when I told him to come to the other side of the building. He kept asking me if it was the north side and since I can’t see a thing, I couldn’t tell him much.

Finally Grandpa arrived, and although we were several minutes late for our appointment no one seemed to be checking times, so we went in, through the rigorous security checks and into the building.

We decided to go up to the Senate Gallery, but didn’t have tickets. I gave the attendant my “I’m a poor little granny from California, with my grandkids, just trying to give them some exposure to our wonderful politicians.” and the attendant graciously got us some tickets. He could tell we were not going to do anything unseemly in the Senate.

The Senators were all there because they were voting on the debt ceiling, and we spotted Dianne Feinstein, Barbara Boxer, Joe Lieberman and Harry Reid. As usual, no one was sitting at their desk. Everyone was milling around the Senate floor and talking. It all looked very unorganized.

After leaving the Senate Gallery we went to the Visitor’s Center for our tour. Our guide was a nice little old grandma and she had some good stories to tell as she lead us around and pointed out interesting statues and paintings. One story she told us was about being evacuated on 9/11 and looking back at the beautiful capitol building and wondering if this was the last time she would see it standing. It was very emotional.

After our tour we went to the National American Indian Museum, which is a new facility. There we had lunch before exploring the moccasins, gold masks, and other artifacts and hearing some of the Indian myths about the stars, rocks and trees.Our tour of the facility was lead by an Indian girl and she explained that Indians lived a very good life before 1492. They made impressive gold masks and jewelry, but gold was not considered very important in Indian life. Corn was the valuable thing.

After the Europeans arrived Indian life was adversely affected by three things they brought--Guns, Bibles and Disease. This is the Indian perspective. The museum was interesting, but the whole tone didn’t set well with me. It was the typical “You stole our land and our way of life and now we are poor and can’t help ourselves” routine.
We had lunch at the very busy Indian Museum Food Court. There we could choose from different foods from various Indian cultures. Ryan and Isabella had buffalo burgers, Grandpa had black bean and crawfish soup and GG had ceviche.

After lunch we moved on to the Air and Space Museum where we saw all about the Wright Brothers and their successful flight at Kitty Hawke. We got to see their Flyer and other airplanes they developed later. The museum is full of all kinds of airplanes, rockets and space ships. We got to explore the cockpit of a 747, with hundreds of dials and controls and monitors, and we visited a sample sky lab like the one in space. It was very busy at the museum, but we got to see everything.By late afternoon we were all zombies, suffering from information overload, so we went off to the car for our trip home. It was still very hot as we headed home. We thought about stopping at a public swimming pool, but we read in the paper that attendance at the pools is way down because the water is too hot, and not cool and refreshing. So the kids used the hose in the back yard and had a good time spraying each other.