Day 34 Summer 2011 Road Trip

We slept in a little bit this morning, then had a quick breakfast and caught the 10am hotel shuttle to the Metro Station.

We got off the Metro at the Federal Triangle station and went up to the surface.  We boarded the tour bus at the nearby stop.  We had bought a 2 day bus pass yesterday that allowed us to get on and off the bus anywhere along its route so we got off at The Newseum and went inside.

 

Inside you can wander around on your own and look at the many displays or you can take a 1 hour tour that shows you the highlights and then you can wander around after.  The entrance fee is good for 2 days, and a true news junky could easily spend 2 days here.  I wish we had more time but as it was, we spent 3 hours here.  We will definitely come back here the next time we are in Washington DC.

Our first stop on the tour was the Berlin Wall display.  An actual segment of the Berlin wall is here.   It is the largest display of actual sections of the wall outside of Germany.

This is the Western side of the wall.. full of graffiti and free expression.

 

And the Eastern (Communist) side of the wall..



From this exhibit we then went to the Katrina exhibit.  There is a wall of different newspaper headlines covering the event.

  

Who among us can forget watching Anderson Cooper’s nightly broadcast.  He stood each night in front of a boarded up rug shop, and the Museum has those plywood boards on display.

  

Another display is The Presidents Photographer..  Many great photographs of Presidents are in this gallery.

 

Another display is the 9/11/2001 display.  Hundreds of front page headline newspapers fill the room and a piece of the radio tower that was on the roof of the building.

  

There is a gallery dedicated to Tim Russert.



And a First Amendment display.  Simply put, the First Amendment of the United States of America protects your right to worship freely, to speak, read and write freely and to meet freely.

  

There is also a display for the fallen heroes of the press.  The Journalists Memorial

  

After our tour we went up to the 6th floor and outside onto the observation deck to have our pictures taken with the Capital Building as our backdrop.

 

There are many many more displays in the Newseum, too many to photograph or describe in a short blog.  Don’t miss seeing the Newseum when you visit Washington DC.

We left the Newseum and walked to the Capitol Building.  Along the way we passed the Canadian Embassy.

  

At the Capitol Building we took a few more photos.  I turned around to get this shot of the George Washington Monument.

  

We re-boarded our tour bus and drove a short distance to the Jefferson Memorial.  Thomas Jefferson was one of the principal authors of the Declaration of Independence and was the 3rd President of the United States.

  

Back on the bus we went to the next stop on the tour, the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Memorial.

Roosevelt was also known by his initials FDR and was the 32nd President of the United States of America.  He was the only President to serve more than 2 terms.

The memorial is divided up into 4 outdoor areas or rooms.  Dedicated on May 2, 1997 by President Bill Clinton, the monument, spread over 7.5 acres, it traces 12 years through a sequence of the four outdoor rooms, one for each of FDR's terms of office. Sculptures inspired by photographs depict the 32nd president alongside his dog Fala. Other sculptures depict scenes from the Great Depression, such as listening to a fireside chat on the radio and waiting in a bread line.
 
  

A bronze statue of First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt standing before the United Nations emblem honours her dedication to the UN. It is the only presidential memorial to depict a First Lady.



Water is a prominent feature throughout the memorial.

  

Back on the bus, we headed to the Metro for the ride back to our hotel.  Our visit to Washington DC is over, tomorrow morning we are back on the road again, heading North into Pennsylvania.  We will be spending the next week or so driving Westward along the Historic Lincoln Highway and visiting a couple of historical sites along the way.

To see all of our photos from today you can click on this link to our FLICKR site.

Day 33 Summer 2011 Road Trip

Today we got up early and had breakfast.  At 9:00am we got into the free shuttle from the hotel to the New Carrollton Metro station for our Metro subway ride into Washington DC.

We got off at the L’Enfant station and went up to the surface to board our tour bus.  This bus follows a circular loop with many stops along the way and you can get on and off at your leisure.  There are 2 other loops that other buses do and you can transfer onto those buses to go to other popular destinations.  We figured out what we wanted to see and do today so we knew what bus to be on and what stops to get off at.

As a side note, but appropriate to our visit to Washington DC, today is President Barack Obama’s birthday.

Our first stop is the Lincoln Memorial.  This was built to honour the 16th President of the United States.

  

From up on the top steps of the Lincoln Memorial, I pointed the camera towards the Washington Monument and what should have been the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, except for the fact that the Reflecting Pool has been torn out and is being rebuilt.



We then walked a short distance to the Korean War Veterans Memorial.  It commemorates those who served in the Korean War.

  

There is also a reflecting wall and a reflecting pool at the Memorial.

  

Another short walk and we are at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial.

This is the bronze statue named “The Three Soldiers”



And this is the Memorial Wall where the names of 58,267 dead or missing soldiers are etched into the highly polished stone wall.

  

Leaving the Memorial, we walked along beside what would have been the Reflecting Pool towards the National World War II Memorial.

  

I turned around and took this photo looking back to where we had been at the Lincoln Memorial.

 

Here are some more photos of the National WWII Memorial.

  

Next we are going to walk over to the base of the Washington Monument.  Built to commemorate the 1st President of the United States.  This is the tallest structure in Washington DC.




Back on the bus we head across the Potomac River to visit Arlington National Cemetery.  We will visit John F. Kennedy’s grave site.

  

John F. Kennedy, his wife Jackie and his two deceased children are buried at this site.  The markers are black slate and it is very hard to read their names on the markers.  I thought it was a rather simple grave site for such an important person and President of the United States of America.  The eternal flame is at the head in the middle of John and Jackie’s markers.  The flame is lit but it does not show up in my photos.

  

Kennedy’s grave is on a sloping hill that looks directly at the Washington Monument.



There is also a granite wall with engravings of excerpts of some of Kennedy’s most famous speeches.  This is one of those excerpts.



Elsewhere in Arlington National Cemetery there was a military burial taking place and out of nowhere came this military plane in fast and low to honour the person being buried.



This concluded our visit today to Washington DC, we got back on the tour bus and headed back to the Federal Triangle Metro subway stop and rode back to our stop at New Carrollton where the hotel shuttle picked us up and took us to our hotel.

There are a few more sites around Washington that we want to see tomorrow.

Till then….

Don’t forget to see all of the photos, just click on this link to FLICKR.