Penn Vacation - DC

I have been wanting to visit our nation's capitol for as long as I can remember. So of course we had to go since we were so close. An important tidbit to know...there are no information booths open on Mondays in the state of Maryland. Go ahead, try and find one, I dare you! We ended up going into the city without any idea where anything was. You all should be so proud, I winged it. We had planned to go later in the week so I hadn't looked into things to do, but then our plans got switched around and so the only day we could do it was Monday.

We started off at the museum of natural history. I thought it would be just like any other museum, so wasn't thinking it would take that long, but would be a good place to get a map of DC. Boy was I wrong. I was totally impressed with the displays. They did such a great job!

I did a report on this deer in the 8th grade. It's a Chinese Water Deer. I thought it was cool because of the sharp pointing teeth it has.

The dinosaurs were really popular. All the pictures I got were in close proximity to the object. Plus they were just so big that it was near impossible to get the whole thing in the shot.

I saw these on ice age and thought, what a funny looking thing. Then I saw the bones at the museum and thought, nope, still funny looking :)

Supposedly there is a pyramid of pure gold at the tippy top of the National Monument that supposed to reflect sunshine and be seen from miles away when the sun hits it just right. At least, that is what Dan Brown said, and we all know that he doesn't draw any un-researched conclusions.

The WW2 Monument. It was really pretty. There is also a Vietnam memorial, but with all the construction around the place, it got missed in our journey.

You can see the construction around the reflecting pool going on. That was sort of a bummer that we couldn't go right up to it, but you can imagine the view when it's operational and it's almost as good.

Good ol' Abe. I think he may have been the most popular stop all day.

The White House. It's wasn't as grand as what we thought it would be.

The ceiling of the Library of Congress.

This building was so ornate in design. This place also housed a Gutenburg Bible, but they asked that people not take pictures, so we obeyed the signs.

The fountain out front was pretty fun too.

The capitol building was right across the street from the library of congress. We got there too late to see the visitor center. There were guards swarming the place as well so we figured it would be better not to try and sneak a peak.

Outside the space and flight museum.

All in all the trip to DC was great. We have to go back though and catch all the stuff we missed. Hopefully on not such a hot day as well.