J.O.Y. 2005 Trip Journal #2

Wednesday 27 July 2005

Yesterday was a great day.  We slept in (at least compared to today) and didn’t leave our hotel until after 9am.  We went downtown and walked around the White House.  Then we walked down to the National Mall (no – it’s not a shopping center, but the big green lawn that runs from the U.S. Capitol building to the Lincoln Memorial).  We went to the Smithsonian Institute’s National Museum of Natural History where we looked at all sorts of things like skeletons of a duck billed platypus, the Hope diamond, lots of dinosaurs, the insect zoo with all kinds of things we’ve never seen before and hope never to see again.  Then, after lunch in the museum’s cafeteria, we went off to the National Museum of American History.  There we saw the flag that was lowered over the Pentagon after the 9/11 bombings, the ruby slippers from the Wizard of Oz, Kermit the Frog, Mr. Rogers’ sweater, Oscar the Grouch, a wonderful exhibit on Ella Fitzgerald, and some really old computers including the first ever microchip.  After the museum we walked up the mall and saw the Washington Monument, the reasonably new World War II memorial, the Lincoln Memorial, and the Vietnam War Memorial.  Then we walked up towards the Metro (that’s the Washington, D.C. subway system) stop through parts of George Washington University where we sat for a bit in their beautifully air conditioned student union and drank rather a large quantity of the ice cold water in their drinking fountains.  We took the Metro home and didn’t lose anyone even though it was the end of the evening rush hour and we had to change trains.  We ate dinner at the nearest McDonald’s and came back to the hotel for a little time of swimming and cooling off in our rooms.

More about today’s adventures this evening.

Peace, Pastor Moira