Washington, DC Revisited

For a fall 2010 tour of the US Historic East, including Colonial, Revolutionary, and Civil War sites, I had an early morning flight from Minneapolis to Chicago. I do dislike early morning flights. But I would rather take one when going to a domestic destination and have a decent amount of time on my first day than taking a late flight and not getting to see anything before the tour begins. This tour, the flight from Chicago to Washington’s Reagan National was delayed by a thunderstorm. After getting a good late lunch at the hotel, I set off to explore the area around it.

I was upgraded to a suite on a special floor where you had to use your room card on the elevator when selecting the floor in order to get there. Unlike Amman, Jordan where I had a suite but couldn’t use it, I had two full nights at this hotel. After getting back to the hotel from my exploration of the neighborhood (the hotel was roughly a block from the White House), I checked out the VIP room for the people on my floor. I found bottled water, fruit, pastries and small bottles of sparkling wine. Trying not to be too much of a pig, I hauled a few items back to my room. I wasn’t going to need to go anywhere for dinner that night.

We had about 45 people on the tour. Since it had to do with US history, there were several Americans. We also had a few Canadians and a couple of Brits. Our Tour Director was named Scott. At our meet and greet that evening, I met a couple of ladies (Judy & Gaye) from Louisville, Kentucky with whom I often sat for dinner or lunch.

The following morning, we began our tour with a walk to Lafayette Park and the White House. However, we were fairly quickly asked to leave as the President and his family were walking from the White House to the church on the other side of the park (St Johns) to attend Sunday morning service. So we walked back to the hotel, jumped on our tour coach and made our way to Arlington National Cemetery.

The first thing we did was to visit the graves of President Kennedy, Jackie, Bobby & Ted. Then we looked at some of the Civil War graves before heading to the Iwo Jima Memorial. The land upon which the cemetery stands was originally owned by the Custis family. These were the descendants of George Washington’s wife, Martha and her children by her first husband. Martha’s great-granddaughter married a fella named Robert E. Lee.

When he resigned his commission in the US military and took the reins of the Confederate army (actually the Army of Northern Virginia at that time), Lee stationed his army on his property. This was way too dangerous for the Union. So once the Union managed to remove Lee and his forces, they took over the property. It wasn’t widely used as a cemetery until after the war ended, although a couple bodies were buried on the outskirts once the other cemeteries in the DC area filled up.

The Iwo Jima Memorial is actually dedicated to the US Marines. This was not a memorial that I saw on my first trip to DC back in 1999, so I was glad to see it. We then visited the Korean War Memorial, which I find to be very haunting. Next came the Lincoln Memorial (one of my favorites) and the Vietnam War Memorial. The son of one of our neighbors back in Dallas, where I grew up, died in the Vietnam War. We had enough time there for me to look up his name and find it on the memorial.

We drove by the Capitol, only stopping for a photo from across the lawn. That was okay since I had been able to go inside on my last tour to DC. I had other plans for my free time in the afternoon. We were dropped off at the Smithsonian National Gallery of Art to get lunch and set off on our free time. We could either return there later in the afternoon for a pickup or make our own way back to the hotel. I chose to make my own way back.

After lunch, I walked to Ford’s Theatre. During my last trip, I had been able to see the museum in the basement of the theatre, but not the theatre itself. It had been closed due to a performance of a play. After paying for my admission, I walked up the stairs and entered the theatre at the balcony level. I was retracing John Wilkes Booth’s footprints at that point, but then I departed the path he took to walk down to the front row of the balcony and sit down to soak it all in.

When I was in college, I had designed the costumes for a play which ended up traveling to Ford’s Theatre as part of a competition for play productions from universities around the US. Since I wasn’t actually in the play that time, I didn’t get to go. Just my costumes. I stared at the stage for a while, imagining my costumes moving about down there.

Although you can’t get into the Presidential box itself, you can see right into it from the same perspective that John Wilkes Booth had in the small hallway right behind the presidential box. I managed to get a pretty decent photo from there without reflections. After spending as much time in the theatre itself as I wanted to, I went downstairs to the museum and explored that again.

I had been pretty much all by myself in the theatre and had purchased the ticket to see both the theatre and the Peterson House across the street. Back out in the street, there wasn’t any line in front of the Peterson House at all. I went in and found that I had it pretty much to myself too. The challenge with photographing the bed on which Lincoln died, is that it is completely surrounded by glass. So getting a photo without reflections is difficult. But I don’t think I did too badly. He was too tall for the bed and had to lie diagonally across it.

On my way back to the hotel, I went by Madame Tussaud’s, so I decided to stop in. In addition to the usual actors, singers, etcetera, this one had several historical figures and presidents. Not all of the wax figures are great likenesses of their subjects, but they can give you a good general idea of what someone looks like – especially height and build. Since you can walk around among them, you can stand toe to toe.

That night, we went to Georgetown for a delicious seafood dinner, followed by a visit to the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. I sat with Judy and Gaye at dinner. They were delightful company.

A World War II Memorial had been built in 2004. We visited it too and took photos from there of the Lincoln Memorial, Washington Memorial and Capitol. The WWII Memorial was quite beautiful at night. It has memorials for both the European theatre and the Pacific.

Next time – we set off for Alexandria, Mount Vernon, Yorktown, Jamestown, and Williamsburg.