Alan's turn to blog today with Sarah's comments in pink.
Today's plan was to get up nice and early to go on a trolley tour of Washington DC. Unfortunately Sarah slept in and we didn't end up leaving our hotel until 9.30. OK, so I slept in. I wasn't the only one. He may have gotten up before me but chose not to wake me so he could watch some English soccer scores. We walked to the Metro station which is only 5 minutes from our hotel and went down the escalators into the unknown. We found the ticket machines and actually managed to work out our destination and how to buy a ticket without too much trouble at all. Well I did anyway. Sarah wasn't much help. Excuse me. If it wasn't for me being on the ball, he would have paid way too much. We found the correct platform and only had to wait a few minutes before our train came along. 6 stops later we got off and headed back up to the street. We got to the trolley tour stop only to find that the tour we had most wanted to go on was closed until after 1pm due to road closures because of a marathon being run today, so we decided to transfer our tickets until tomorrow.
After studying the map for some time we figured out which way was which and started wandering west. We all know how clever I am when it comes to maps don't we. We walked for a few blocks and came to the front fence of The White House where there was plenty of tourists taking photos. We joined them for a brief time until police came along and told everyone to clear the area and closed the path. I think they were probably concerned about Sarah being a terrorist or something like that. We were just lucky we hadn't arrived a few minutes later or we wouldn't have been able to see it from that close.
Then we walked around the large grass oval in front of The White House toward the Washington Monument, stopping to take photos along the way. After that we chucked a right and headed for The Abraham Lincoln Memorial which was miles away in the distance. First we came to the World War 2 memorial which had all the American states and territories honoured, plus The Philippines. I didn't realise they were ever under American control.
After that we continued our long walk alongside The Reflecting Pool. It always looks so nice in movies and pictures and stuff but in reality it's green and dirty and smelly and full of ducks. As a result it's surrounded by piles and piles of duck poo. Never own a duck!
Anyway after a really long walk we made it to the Lincoln Memorial and climbed the many stairs to the top to see him. It was quite crowded up there and getting photos of Abe was a bit difficult but we managed ok.
The unfortunate thing about having walked so far was that we now had to walk all the way back again. Thankfully it's nowhere near as hot here as everywhere else we've been so far. We passed by the Vietnam war memorial and then through a section of the park where there was squirrels everywhere. They're so cute.
We wanted to go to the Capitol Building but that was just too far to walk so we'll check it out tomorrow. We did get a photo of it in the distance though. We went to The White House visitor centre and had a look around there but it was pretty boring and obviously no substitute for the real thing.
We were getting hungry by now so we found the Hard Rock Cafe and had a steak there as well as taking a few photos. After finishing lunch we went back to the Metro and saw that our train was due in about 3 minutes. We quickly made our way down to the platform but realised it was the wrong one. Lucky we didn't just jump on the train or goodness knows where we might have ended up. We found the right platform just as our train was arriving so we jumped on and had to stand as it was so crowded. It took no time until we were back at our stop and in our hotel. We don't really know how but we'd been out for about 6 hours. No wonder we were tired.
We went for a nice Italian dinner tonight. Very nice food although the staff sure didn't look Italian to us.
Trivia for the day: Drivers around here seem quite happy to queue across intersections blocking traffic when the lights change and turn corners when pedestrians have a walk signal.
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