September 21-23 Washington DC

With a couple of days with no shows and then a show that is too hard to get to we decided to head off to Washington DC for some sightseeing. I will be back later in the tour to see Stryper and ACDC here but Lizz will be back home by then and she really wants to see Washington. We ended up arriving late in the evening on the 21st so simply rested up and spent some time planning on where we wanted to go and see over the next couple of days. The next day saw us head out to the Holocaust museum first. It is actually quite a substantial museum and we ended up spending several hours going through the place. It was very moving and sad to think how on earth humanity could have done this. We then walked over to the Washington monument (the tall pointy thing) and the Lincoln memorial. Our next stop was another place to remember the fallen – Arlington Cemetery. This is where JFK and his family are buried and also thousands of war veterans. We saw the Pentagon from inside the cemetery but did not go into it. After all that walking it was time to crawl back to the hostel and get some rest.

The next day we headed over to Capitol Hill. This is where the US Congress sits. This is made up of the Senate and the House of Representatives. We were able to go into the viewing gallery of both houses and see them in action. We also went on a tour of the old section of the building. Very cool building with exceptional architecture and statues etc. We then went through a tunnel into the Library of Congress. I assumed that this was going to be a library of legal/political books for the politicians to use. Whilst it included that it was a lot more as well. When ever someone submits something for copyright they must submit an extra copy that goes into the Library of Congress. So every item produced books, articles, music etc is in the Library. Also the architecture is awesome and tells a story. After this we went across to the Supreme Court and then up to the White House. Covered the three branches of government in the one day. After that we went back to the hostel to wait until our overnight bus.