On the Mall - DC Day 3

Day 3 of the Huth DC Adventure brought us to the White House for a 7:30 (5:30 Denver time) tour.  The tour allowed nothing but coats and cell phones which made the days logistics a little challenging.  This meant that Dad had to get up at 5:30 to get out the door so he could take the metro through a train change and drop a bag at Union Station and then backtrack a bit to meet the girls on 12th and G to make our way to the tour.  The forecast had a 90% chance of showers and did not disappoint.

The White House tour was pretty unspectacular and I guess it is just a checklist item.  There were many kids there, late teens and 20's I would say.  We must have been behind the Young Republicans or something, or maybe Texans.  These girls had almost groupie affinity for G W Bush.  While viewing one particular photo she said she could just squeeze his cheeks, pretty creepy, especially for some 20 year old girl :-)

After a quick grab of the backpack by me we headed off to a tour of the Capital visting the Washinton Monumant along the way.  Again, the Capital tour was equally as un-spectacular as the WH tour.  It is pretty interesting to be in these physical spaces but I think a short History Channel show would far out pace the information rate of these tours.  Our Capital tour guide was a task master, at one point berating one of our fellow tourites and at another cattle prodding someone else's group out of the way.  Patti and I were both thinking, this would not happen at Disney World.

From there it was on to the Bureau of Engraving and Printing.  This is where the presses never stop rolling.  300 million in paper dollars spin off these presses each day.  It is a pretty impressive process and a very small operation in terms of physical footprint.  No pictures of the actual presses allowed here.  I majored in economics in college in the Keynsian School and as of the last few years I have been won to the Austrian School.  Having never been exposed to it, it help clear up one big issue I always had - how could macro-economics in reality be all that different then micro-economics.  There was a neon sign above the presses that read 'We make money the old fashioned way, we print it'.  So true!  Usually when we go on factory tours we get a free sample at the end, but not today :-(

In the lobby there were a few gold bars on loan (54 pounds of them).  Our tour guide was standing there and said to me that it was worth a lot but did not know how much because he "did not track commodities".  I was a little surprised at that comment but maybe not since the government no longer has to hold any amount of precious metal for every issued denomination of paper currency. The 3 bars below are worth over $2M and cannot be made out of paper at the whim of government.  

We were not planning on visiting the Holocaust Museum as we had visited a concentration camp in the Czech Republic.  We had also read that there are some very difficult sections of this museum that would not be appropriate for kids.  However the money printers were adjacent to this building and we couldn't not go in.  A friendly guard at the entrance directed us to an exhibit designed for kids that related the accounts from a child's perspective.  Thus far Riley says this was her favorite exhibit of the trip.

There was a remembrance hall on the top floor, it was a moving space.  There were no philosophers words or writers prose but only select verses of the word of God found in the Pentateuch.

We visited the WWII and Vietnam Memorials.  There was this day a number of WWII, Korean and Vietnam veterans who were moving about the memorials most being pushed by volunteers and some walking slowly.  Our country is indebted to these men, their comrades and their families.

Last stop of the day was the Lincoln Memorial.  While we were in the memorial a huge rain came in.  Just a torrential downpour.  While we were hanging around waiting for it to let up, Riley was approached by some Chinese folks and asked if she would take pictures with them.  Riley obliged.

The rain backed off a little bit and we decided to continue our plan of crossing the Arlington Bridge and getting on the metro at the cemetery.  It continued to rain and rain even harder.  Patti and I cannot remember being that soaked to the bone but it was about 80 degrees so it felt like being in a warm bath.  The girls really got a kick out of the big buses that would come by and shower us with their wake.

How about this for a no crowds shout of the monument to the man.

See the day 3 pics in the links section.