We arrived in the DC area on Thursday the 16th and spent the remainder of the day, after an 8-hour drive, setting up. Friday we spent just driving around and Bill showing me, and reacquainting himself with, the general area. We hadn’t planned on driving all the way into DC, but we did. We spent a couple hours walking around the Capital Mall and seeing some of the Monuments and Memorials. We didn’t have the cameras with us, so I don’t have any pictures of this yet. We saw the Lincoln Memorial, the Vietnam Wall, the Washington Monument, walked by the White House and the Smithsonian’s and just kind of tooled around the area for a couple of hours. It was nice…cold….but nice. We went from walking barefoot on the Atlantic Coast to freezing temps with light snow..awesome!!
DC is kind of a magical place and Northern Virginia is beautiful. I don’t think I could live here just because all the people here are crazy. There are a TON of people and they are all in a hurry, like their asses are on fire, to get to where they are going, or to earn more money to have more stuff. I just don’t understand that. Why race around like a crazy person just to end up giving yourself a heart attack at 35. Why bother collecting all that stuff when you won’t live long enough to enjoy it, or be too busy getting more stuff to enjoy the stuff you have. Crazy. If it weren’t for the people…I’d live here.
It’s been just too cool to drive around and see all the history. On Saturday the 18th we went to the Fredericksburg Battlefield http://www.nps.gov/frsp/fburg.htm and took a tour of the Chatham House http://www.nps.gov/frsp/chatham.htm , you can read about the history of both yourselves. Again we forgot the cameras, and I have to say that it was nice to not feel obligated to record every step of the way, but to just wander and learn and enjoy. This whole area of the country is awesome and stacked with history and cool stuff. I highly recommend making and effort to visit here if you have any interest in our nations history, but don’t do it in the summer, you’ll never see anything or get anywhere through the seas of people. I would also recommend doing lot’s of research and planning, the traffic here truly sucks and if you don’t know what you are doing or the best times to be on the road the only parts of the areas you’ll see…will be the concrete of the freeways, and I’m not even exaggerating. I can’t even express how nice it is to be able to see these areas with a ‘native’. Bill lived and worked in this area for years and knows how to get around.
I think that’s all for now, we have done a ton of stuff just in the week that we’ve been here and only had the cameras with us for a little part of it. My next post will be about Great Falls Park, The National Zoo, and Arlington Cemetery.
;-)K
