Washington D.C. Trip : Day Two « The Szczepanski Weblog

Washington D.C. Trip : Day Two

Sunday January 18th 12:45 pm :

Got up at 630 this morning after limited amounts of sleep. I was super restless and a little bit sore. I’m sure that has more to do with the cold than the lack of physical activity. Had a fairly decent breakfast (eggs were runny) and we were on the road by 845, bound for Jamestown.

We had another great tour guide, Gloria. She knew so much of the history, which I guess you would expect from a tour guide, but she was able to respond eloquently and intelligently to every question the kids had, no matter how mundane.

First thing I saw walking up to the Visitors center were these HUGE flocks of cardinals and blue jays. My mom would have gone nuts. There must have been 100-150 blue jays sqwaking and at least as many cardinals. First glance of the facility gives you the impression that there was a TON of money poured into the museum. Unfortunately it is about a mile and a half from the ACTUAL site of Jamestown.

That part has always bugged me. I mean, I understand the fragility of the site, but I would’ve loved to see the REAL structures instead of re-creations. It kind of reminds me of Fort Mackinac (for my Michigan peeps), but at least they used parts of the real buildings in the reconstructions. I know, i know…what a complainer, right.

As we were walking thru the museum I noted something interesting. On one of the informational signs there was a Powhatan (tribe native to this area) word…it said “Oke”. The translation read “evil spirit”. Hmm, interesting.

Got to see a musket firing, and again for my Michigan people, this is nothing new.

Had a decent sandwich at lunch time. Christian had pizza, again. Blech. He seems to be having a great time. He’s so intense and his questions for the guides are so complete that sometimes it’s hard to tell if he’s having fun. But then he’ll look over at me and flash his toothy grin, and I understand, he’s just really trying to absorb everything that he can.

SUCCESS. Got my first National Park passport stamp on this trip after much searching. (see my grand canyon post from july for more info on that) Nice. We’re headed back to D.C. now. The guide is obviously settling into a comfort zone with us as he explained to us about the first tribe in Jamestown had to walk several miles to get to the nearest Wal Mart. Sometimes it was an all day trip. : ) Beautiful.

Sunday January 18th 1100pm :

The bus ride back to D.C. was exhausting. As you may have read, 2 million people are descending upon the Capitol for this historic inauguration. And I think they all arrived today. We had plans to go to the Iwo Jima memorial today but because of the concert near there, we had to change plans. We finally got off the bus at about 6pm, after a 5 hour trip (it was scheduled for 3). The city is absolute chaos, but that thought soon faded away as we crossed over the hill and saw the White House for the first time. We were quite the distance away, but it looks so stately at night. As a matter of fact, the whole city looks regal at night. The Capitol building, the Washington monument, look so cool under floodlight. That’s all we really saw tonight. We had another cafeteria style dinner, but it was in the Smithsonian Natural History Museum which was cool. Just walking around in the evening was amazing. All of the buildings are so big. You get a completely different sense of government when you look around. You realize the scope and the breadth of everything as the size of the buildings engulf you.

Our night finished with a walk to the Mall where the inauguration will be held on Tuesday. It was completely empty except for some news reporters. It’s truly invigorating to stand on that empty place and imagine 2 million people there in 2 days celebrating the ability to choose our own leaders. It’s such an honor to be here…I feel truly blessed.

Tomorrow is our monument day. Lots of war memorials and presidential memorials, so probably some emotion too. We are also going to Mt Vernon in the afternoon, looking forward to that.

To be continued.