Mr Bowness goes to Washington

Posted: April 6th, 2009 | Author: Bone | Filed under: Travel | Tags: Washington DC |

Me and Neil went to Washington (DC, we not the state) last weekend and it was a lot of fun (Obama flew over us in a helicopter!). Here are some pictures from the trip.

Our hotel (the Hyatt Regency, which was really nice and pretty cheap too) was only a couple of blocks from the Capitol Building, so we tended to walk past it (or something else cool) most nights. We went for the tour of the Capitol on our last day, it was okay, but the only really interesting part to me was seeing the inside of the rotunda, maybe if I were American it would have meant more to me.

We visited the White House a couple of times, once during the daytime, and then again on Sunday night, visiting the North side (pictured) before dinner and then the more famous view of the South side after dinner. There was hardly any people on the South side (it was about 10pm on a Sunday, so I guess it was to be expected), just me, Neil and a cop at one point, which was weird because I thought there would be a crowd of people there all the time. It was better to go at night because they let you get a bit closer, meaning you can take pictures through the fences rather than taking pictures of the fences.

I thought it was weird the way that people would walk as close to the National Monument as possible, because getting closer to it doesn’t actually reveal anything new, you’re just closer to it, and your pictures will be worse.

Our first day also marked the beginning of the annual Cherry Blossom festival, which I thought was nice, though I don’t think Neil’s hayfever agreed.

Considering the only time I’d ever heard of the Thomas Jefferson memorial was in a Simpson’s episode I wasn’t expecting too much of it, but the building was pretty epic, and the tidal basin location was spectacular.

I like the way that the National Monument is so much bigger than everything else in the city.

It’s crazy how much cool stuff they have in the museums along the Mall, for example, if I remember correctly, the space suit in this picture has actually been into space, and just outside of the Air & Space museum they had a module on the back of a truck that was actually going to be part of the Space station, which is probably one of the best things I’ve ever seen on the back of a truck.

This is the Library of Congress, it was connected to the Capitol Building by a tunnel so me and Neil thought we’d check it out after our tour. I was expecting it to be a very boring government building, so as you can imagine I was pretty happy when we left the tunnel and found this amazing building.

This is JFKs grave up in Arlington cemetery. A cemetery being a tourist attraction is a pretty strange concept to me (you could take a bus tour of it), but it was a fairly amazing site seeing all the perfectly aligned graves. I think that the American WW2 memorial in France is probably ‘better’ though.

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