First Day in Washington

Hello everyone. Yesterday we made great time. We left Athens at 4:30 and we arrived at our hotel in downtown Arlington at 2:30. We unpacked the car, fed Elijah, and left the hotel. As we pulled out of the hotel driveway we found ourselves staring at the Iwo Jima Memorial and Arlington Cemetery. They are literally in our back yard. Our hotel is right on top of them. The Iwo Jima Memorial is literally amazing to see close up. The men stand 32+ feet tall. They’re even bigger than the Lincoln Memorial.

Once we got out of the parking lot we were driving along the Potomac River for about a mile before we crossed the bridge into downtown D.C. First of all, we parked and walked to the Smithsonian, which by the way, is not one museum. It is several museums. We only went to one yesterday however, the Sackler gallery. They have a special exhibit right now of ancient and medieval biblical manuscripts. This was especially exciting for me because I got to see the Papyrus 46 folio of Galatians 1, which is the text I have been using for 2 of the papers I’ve been writing for the last 4 months.

After the Smithsonian, we walked all the way down Independence Avenue. By the way, D.C. is a very windy city. The temperature is not bad; it’s 50 degrees. But it’s windy and dry, so it felt a lot colder. Anyhow, we walked down to the Washington Monument and the World War II Memorial. From there, we walked all the way down the Reflections Pool (and can you believe it, we couldn’t talk about anything but Forrest Gump and Jenny running to meet each other!) to the Lincoln Memorial. (We didn’t have time to also do the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, but we will be going back.) They were awesome, especially the Lincoln Memorial. It is enormous. He is sitting inside what looks like an ancient Greek temple, with Doric style columns. There are 36(for the states when he was president), and each is absolutely enormous. By the time we got to Lincoln, it was about 7 o’clock, so it was plenty dark at this point. The Memorial looks beautiful lit up at night. The temple and the background is all beige/tan, with a heavenly-ish white light shining down on Abe.

Then we went back to the hotel for pizza. In a few minutes, we’ll be leaving to take a walk around the Iwo Jima Memorial and Arlington Cemetery. Then we’re going back across the bridge to take a tour of the White House at noon.

By the way everyone, Blogger is a stupid service and the pictures are not loading right now. Check back in a little while and maybe we'll have them up.

Also, Elijah's two front teeth on the top have now broken through.