"TOO MUCH - TOO LITTLE TIME"

Today was our final day in Washington, DC. We will be checking out of Cherry Hill Park tomorrow morning and heading toward Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. We are not sure how far we will get tomorrow, since they are predicting heavy rain starting tonight and into tomorrow. We have either chased storms or followed storms across the country.
We have had a wonderful time exploring Washington, DC, however, two days was much too short. I don't think that we could have seen everything we wanted in a week. There is so much history here; it is overwhelming. We had a difficult time picking and choosing which sites to see. Taking the tour bus and walking worked out best for us. We could get on and off the bus as often as we wanted to visit various sites on the tour route. We started every day at Union Station, where we hopped on the "Big Red" double deck tour bus. We only managed to see Arlington National Cemetery and the National Air and Space Museum on Saturday. Arlington National Cemetery was a breath taking, solemn experience. Until I say it in person, I had no concept of the number how large it was - 624 acres - and how many service men and women are buried there - over 320,000. There are rows and rows of perfectly straight grave stones. We were told by the tour guide, that the stones are set so perfectly as if they are saluting. We were luck enough to be there for the changing of the guard at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier at 12 noon. A sentinel of the Third U.S. Infantry maintains vigil around the clock. The changing of the guard takes place every half hour between March 15 and September and every hour during the other time. I learned that the sentinel paces 21 steps alongside the tomb, pauses 21 seconds and returns. There was a tremendous crowd of tourists there Saturday and you could have heard a pin drop - it was so quiet during the moving ceremony. After about two hours there, we hopped back onto the BR tour bus and rode to the National Air and Space Museum where we wandered until we had to catch the shuttle bus back to Cherry Hill RV Park at 430pm. What an amazing museum. There is so much to see and there were so many tourists there also. We saw everything from the original plane of Orville and Wilbur Wright, to missiles to rockets to a mock up of the Apollo Moon Launch. By the end of yesterday our feet were sore and our brains overtaxed with information. We were up at 5am again this morning, on the shuttle bus at 645 and ready for another day of sight seeing. This morning we decided to walk to a few sites rather than waiting until 9am for the tour bus. We headed to the U.S. Capital first and managed to get a fairly good picture of it with the reflecting pond in front. It was a little cloudy and cool first thing in the morning, but the sun came out later in the day. From there we walked over to one of the BR bus stops and hopped the bus to the Lincoln Memorial, the Vietnam Veterans Memorial and the Korean Memorial. I had never seen the Vietnam Wall and had no idea what to expect. First I was amazed at the number of tourists visiting the wall and especially the number of foreign visitors visiting. It was an overwhelming experience. The sheer magnitude of the number of lives that were lost in the Vietnam War was brought to perspective. This was also a very solemn experience as lines of tourists quietly passed the wall.
Our last stop was at the Smithsonian Castle and the Natural History Museum. We spent the afternoon touring both. The Smithsonian Castle is was built between 1847 - 1855 and has beautiful grounds in front and actually looks like a castle from the outside. When you walk through the back door, you are on the National Mall and the Natural History Museum is right across the mall. That is an amazing building with three floors. On each floor there were dedicated areas for mammals, oceans, dinosaurs, butterflies, fossils, etc. So much interesting information in one place. Our poor old brains were overloaded! Mentally and physically tired - we hopped the BR tour bus back to Union Station, grabbed an ice cream cone at McDonalds and rested our weary bones until the shuttle bus arrived and whisked us back to Cherry Hill. Our Washington adventure is quickly coming to a close. While Robert worked on our route for tomorrow; I captioned the pictures we took today and attempted to put together this quick blog. We are off on the next leg of our journey tomorrow.