Today was Saturday and since it was the weekend, we decided to drive around to a few sites. We had a yummy breakfast of sausage and eggs and then got in the truck and headed toward the National Cathedral. This was something that had really not crossed my mind until late in the planning stages. After reading about it,
I knew we had to go. It's the 6th largest cathedral in the world and you can see it from miles around. As we got closer, I knew that the pictures that I had seen on the internet did not do it justice. It was really a wonder to behold. It didn't open until 10 and we got there about 9:30 so we sat outside and just looked at it. There were lots of things to see. The building is incredibly detailed with lots of
gargoyles and grotesques. grotesques' are basically faces that decorate various parts of the building and they are all different. The purpose of gargoyles is to decorate a water spout so when it rains, the water comes out of the mouths.
Anyway, the time had come to go in. It was absolutely stunning. The stained glass windows were huge and each one had pictures that mostly symbolized some happening in American History. The cathedral was not that old. In fact, it was finished during the 1980's. We spent a couple of hours looking around and like most attractions in Washington, there was really too much to look at and it was time to depart for our next site.
Our next destination was the Air and Space Museum at Dulles International Airport. This was a fairly new part of the Smithsonian family and it was housed in a huge aircraft hanger. The good thing about this is that it was able to host full size aircraft. The museum is kind of far away from the city plus you have to pay a toll, and parking is $15. When we got there, we found a little shade tree and had a quick picnic lunch. After that we went into the hanger and immediately knew that we would not be disappointed. There were indeed full size aircraft including the SR-71 Blackhawk, the Enola Gay, the Concord and the space
shuttle, Enterprise. It also had many, many planes from different time periods and the smaller ones were hung from the ceiling as if they were flying. There was an elevated walkway around the hanger so you could get nose to nose with the planes. It was awesome! I could have stayed there all day, but again, we had other fish to fry and needed to head back to the campground for a quick break and then it was back to D.C. for an evening tour. We had burgers for dinner and went to catch the train. It was Saturday and we realized that the trains don't run as much, so we were a little slow in getting to our meeting place. We ended up having to jog from the station to where our tour was supposed to start. This tour was a walking tour and it was all about Lincoln's assassination. We ended up being about 10 minutes late, but didn't miss too much. We started at Andrew Jackson's statue in front of the White House and the tour guide led us to several locations having to do with the events leading up to Abraham Lincoln's death. The guide was really great! He gave us so much information and I had no idea of the thought and planning that John Wilkes Booth had put into his ultimate goal. The tour ended about 2 hours later in front of Ford's Theater. I was really glad we did it and we all learned so much.
After the tour, we found an ice cream place called FroZenYo. It was a frozen yogurt place that lets you serve yourself a large selection of yogurt and then they charge you based on the weight of your serving. It was really good! We then headed back to the mall area, saw a few monuments lit up at night, ooohed and ahhed and then found the closest train center. After a long day we fell into bed to get as much sleep as we could before we began the next leg of our journey.
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