Our kids have very little experience with public transportation, they have ridden the bus down the Strip once. Here they are on the Metro, which was a little confusing at first but we got the hang of it quickly.
Dean Heller's office had arranged a tour of the Capital Building for us with an intern named Jonas. He was a great tour guide. He is a high school teacher in Las Vegas and went to BYU-I. He took us through the underground tunnels to get to the Capital. We even got to ride the little subway train for the Senators.
We went through the Capital's Visitors Center and saw this statue of Freedom and a short video about the building.
We got to see a few extra places because our group was so small, like the original Supreme Court room. In the hall of statues, we put our feet in the compass rose, which divides the city into the 4 quadrants.
Then we waited outside the Speaker's House to step out on to the Speaker's Balcony.
The balcony had an amazing view of the city and was right above where the Presidents take their oath of office.
The ceiling of the rotunda was being fixed, so the pictures weren't great, but Dave took his picture with his favorite President. The base of this Ronald Reagan statue is made out of the Berlin Wall.
We went back through the tunnels to get to the Library of Congress and to avoid the heat.
We took a tour there also, our guide seemed a bit off though, and we saw very few actual books.
The building was amazing, using Greek and Roman architecture. There were cool quotes about wisdom and knowledge all over the ceilings, and also a painting of guys playing naked baseball. Behind me is a fresco of the goddess of wisdom.
We saw the reading room, where you can look at the books for research purposes (you can't check them out).
We saw an original Gutenberg Bible, the first map that included the Americas, and books from Jefferson's collection.
Then we went down to the children's reading room. Cam found this Braille copy of The Hunger Games.
Seth found some of his favorites - Gerald & Piggy books and Stink books. He was not lovin' this library until then.
And we even found something Alexis should read - this sign!
We ate lunch at We the Pizza. It was greasy but good. We started walking to the Lincoln Memorial, but we got too hot and tired so we stopped at the Air and Space Museum. Dave walked around saying "how cool" about everything.
We went back out to continue our walk to Lincoln, as it started raining. Lex wanted to take a "Singing in the Rain" pic.
We were drenched by the time we got to the Washington Monument.
We kept walking and saw the WWII Memorial and was able to look up Dave's Grandpa, who died in the Pacific.
We finally made it to the Reflecting Pool.
We took some selfies at the base of the Lincoln Memorial.
We finally made it to the top.
Then we had to walk quite a ways back to the Metro station. Our feet were so tired, we tried walking wit our shoes off for a bit but everything was rocky. We were very grateful to have our hotel shuttle pick us up from the station and even happier to get off our feet.
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