Washington DC

We spend a lot of time touring Washington DC. These are some of the places we went. You have to have reservations to tour the White House (6 months out), The Pentagon (3 months out), or to view the Senate or the House in session (2 or 3 months out), so of course we did not know anything about this rule, so we only could see some off these places.

Of course the White House was the most important place see, and we were only able to visit the White House Visitors Center across the street. This fence in front of the lawn is as close as you can get to the White House, and we looked around but there were no Obama family members in sight when we were there.



We parked at a Metro Station close to where we were staying, and took the Metro everywhere we went while we were visiting Washington DC. There are so many people and so many cars, that is the Metro is the only reasonable way to get around town for tourists. When we arrived in the DC area, we went to the metro stop at the Union Station. This is where all Amtrak trains come into DC and it is a very big Metro stop as well, due to the location. The Union Station is beautiful, and a very busy place, almost like a small town with many restaurants and a shopping mall and everything. These pictures were taken there during our several trips into DC.

Our US Capitol was one of the places we wanted to spend some time, and even though we could not go into the chambers where the Senate and the House were in session, we were able to take a tour of the Capitol Building. This is a beautiful building inside and out, there were so many people there on tours.




We went to the Lincoln Memorial, what a moving and inspiring place this is, very emotional and very beautiful.

We saw the Washington Monument also, they have tours to the top of the monument each day, and you must arrive there first thing in the morning to get tickets, so we did not go up to the top, we were told that the view from the top is spectacular.

These pictures are of the Jefferson Memorial and the The Washington National Cathedral

I will post another blog tomorrow and add more pictures of places in DC and also the great open top tour bus we went on. We had a great time here in Washington DC.