After Bowie, we went right up to the edge of D.C. where my friend Emie lives. We had lunch with her at a lot Burmese restaurant and she took us into the city proper. It was extremely hot, definitely the hottest day on which we did any serious walking. We managed to see most of the primary monuments anyway:
a white house
The White House was much smaller than I remembered it, possibly because since I last went around the age of 10, I’ve seen Independence Day several times and it just looks a lot more impressive in that. Chris also said it was smaller than he’d imagined it would be. I suppose, for a country whose leader is referred to as Mister President rather than your majesty, a little modesty is probably advisable. It really is just a fairly large house, though the grounds are quite big.
Next we went onto the Washington Monument:
There isn’t actually that much shade and the buildings are quite far apart, so as the thermometer hit 100, we decided to take an Uber cab to our last monument of the day. It is such a great way to travel! Emie has used them loads of times and has some friends who are drivers and told us that, yes, they are in fact vetted (which we hadn’t really gotten a clear answer to), so it wasn’t too different from getting a regular cab except it was extremely fast and the cars were nicer. That last monument was the Jefferson memorial. We all preferred him over Lincoln, so we went for his monument instead (in Chris’s case, most of his info causing his Jefferson fandom is down to this book):
After dropping Emie off, we had to go through some of D.C. to go down into Virginia. We happened across this on the way out:
It was under construction, so it may be less obvious, but this is the U.S. Capitol. They seem to be redoing the top, but after so many State Capitols, I’m glad we didn’t entirely miss out on the big one.
We drove on into Virginia. It was so hot going over the border that my phone got too hot to film, so no border picture, though we do have some video of my quick attempt to get the iPhone up and running just in time.
Here’s the video: