We slept in until 10:30am today and missed out on our hotel’s complimentary breakfast. Then I worked on uploading to my blog until noon. We were being pretty relaxed about getting in to town because we are both sick. We ate leftover Chinese food for breakfast.
We left the hotel around 12:30pm via the hotel’s courtesy shuttle. It dropped us at the metro station and we took the metro into town. Looking at a subway map we figured a shorter way to get to our destination by changing trains a couple times. It seemed like the fewer stops would make up for the time spent changing trains. So at the Pentagon station we changed to the yellow line, and at L’enfant plaze we changed back to blue. One stop later we arrived at the Smithsonian metro station.
It was a short walk to 14th street and C where we found the Bureau of Engraving and Printing. We did the twenty minute free tour. It was very interesting to watch the paper money being made. We learned that parts of the security systems are actually made into the paper which is then delivered to the BEP for printing. And we saw the machines that scan the bills for consistency, as well as the machines which cut the 34 bill sheets down to single stacks of 100 bills. (The BEP, btw, is only responsible for making paper money and not coins. Coins are made at the U.S. Mint.)
Next we went to check out the Smithsonian museums. First, we walked to the Smithsonian of American history. We walked through the museum, but very little caught our attention. We aren’t that interested in American history, and Davin was simply not in a museum mood. So we decided to walk to the Capitol building instead.
We stopped for lunch at an overpriced National Park refreshment stand, and bought a couple of hot dogs and drinks. We didn’t mind paying too much for the food since all the museums and monuments are free. I noticed that there were D.C. killer squirrels everywhere. When I was here last time, I made the mistake of feeding a squirrel and it assaulted me. It jumped right on me and tried to take my sandwich! It scared the crap out of me at the time... Anyway, take it from me, DO NOT FEED THE SQUIRRELS!!
When we arrived at the Capitol, Davin got the idea of walking the length of the entire National Mall, from the Capitol all the way to the Lincoln memorial. I didn’t really realize how far that was, so I readily agreed. We recorded bits and pieces of our walk as we went. We past all the Smithsonian museums, finally past the Washington monument, then the WW2 memorial, and walked past the algae filled Reflecting pool until we finally arrived at the base of the Lincoln memorial. In all it took us about an hour to walk the Mall. We were walking pretty slow for us though. We took pictures of all the memorials and monuments we past.
Next, we walked past the Vietnam memorial, which I personally don’t think was designed particularly well. We stopped for a look at the White House, and then we walked back towards the Washington monument. This time we past in and continued south for the FDR and Jefferson memorials. We didn’t go a particularly good way though, so we aborted when we came near the BEP again. We headed back to the subway and arrived shortly after 7pm.
Then we made several subway blunders. First, we jumped on a Green line train cause Davin assumed it went the same place as the Yellow and it didn’t. We arrived back at L’enfant just as the train we needed was on the other side. I wanted to run for it, but D said we’d never make it. It turned out we got there right as the door shut, so just a little running and we’d have made it. Then he decided the wait for the Yellow was too long so we took the Orange back in the direction we’d come from in the first place. Only when we arrived did we realize why that was a mistake. Anyway, I was fed up with following Davin’s lead and refused to go back to L’enfant station AGAIN. So we just waited the 10 minutes for the Blue subway to take us straight to our destination without any changes. We finally got underway at 7:30pm and arrived at Franconia-Springfield at 8:15pm.
We called for the shuttle to take us to the hotel. There I ordered more Chinese food. We ate our leftover Kung Po chicken along with our fresh General Tso’s chicken. Meanwhile, I worked on my blog, and Davin surfed the internet and took a bath. We went to bed around midnight.
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