25 July Washington D.C

Morning all,

Seeing as my baggage arrived yesterday, it meant that we could actually make use of the breakfast in the hotel. Cereal and hot food were available. The hotel is in a good spot too as it's just 5 minutes walk to the metro at Dupont Circle so you can easily access different parts of the city - a part of town that has many restaurants and chances for shopping whilst also being hosting a big slice of the gay community.

We headed out to catch a sightseeing bus tour and decided to just focus on one of the loops today as we have a full day again tomorrow.  We went for a loop around Georgetown, one of the oldest parts of the city which is home to a mix of students and diplomats. Here are a few things that we saw:

#US Peace Institute

#Washington Monument - a 555ft 5inch monument that took two phases of construction to finally be finished. It has windows at the top on all four sides which allow to to look in the 4 compass directions across the city.

#US treasury

#Washington Public Library

#Union Station - in today's money it cost over a billion dollars to construct. Can you imagine one costing that much nowadays?

#Window cleaners doing the windows 10 floors up. There is a rule in D.C that the buildings can't be too tall....the width of the street plus 20ft is the limit.

#Huge queues outside the brown house - where Lincoln died.

#Nice shot of the Capital building from near the White House.

#Washington Harbour - beautiful place to have a paddle or a boat cruise.

#The Watergate hotel - where that huge scandal of a break in at the offices and exposure of taped conversations relating to illegal activity led to the resignation of Nixon from the presidency.

The beautiful day unfortunately meant that us two pasty-white Brits got a little sunburnt - even with factor 50 suncream on, so we headed back to the hotel for a couple of hours rest so that we could apply a little aftersun and cool off a little.

We then decided to have a night-time stroll around some of the key monuments that the city has to offer:

#White House - looking good despite it being torched by the Brits in 1814. Since being finished in around 1924 (rebuilt, should I say) its exterior hasn't changed much but there have been a few alterations made by various people, such as the addition of a pool by Franklin Roosevelt, being gutted by Truman, Jacqueline Kennedy bringing back the antiques, a bowling alley added by Nixon, solar panels by Carter which were then removed by Reagan, a jogging track by Clinton and a T-ball field by Bush.

#Eisenhower executive offices next to the White House.

#Cheeky pic with the Washington monument.

#World War II memorial - situated at one end of the reflecting pool and honours 400,000 American who died in the war and 16 million who served.

#Lincoln memorial - part of the National Mall (approx. 1.9 miles long) and where a lot of protesting takes place. Lincoln sits on his chair and has a great view of the reflecting pool which leads to the monument and the capital in the distance.

To his left is the Gettysburg Address.

I stood on the very steps where Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his famous 'I Have A Dream' speech!!!!!!

We then headed back uptown towards the metro so we could go back - it was gone midnight by then. On the way we said hello to Einstein ;-)

So it was back to the hotel and time for bed....we have to be up relatively early if we're going to spend hours being geeks in the Smithsonian ;-)

Night all!