Thursday, August 7, 2014

Washington D.C. - The National Mall

We spent a good amount of time at the National Mall. For those who are confused (as I was the first time hearing it), the National Mall is not full of stores for shopping, it's an outdoor national park that houses many famous memorials and monuments. 
We saw the Washington Monument.

And then the boys started break dancing for no reason. 
It was extremely cute.

We gazed up at the tall monument for a while. 

We got lunch from some of the many food trucks parked right by the mall.
 
This was my first exposure to food trucks and I know that's a small sample size, but I was not impressed. The food was decent (nothing spectacular) and way overpriced. Maybe it's just because we were in D.C. where I'm sure the cost of food is way more than Indiana, but that's still no excuse to charge 9 bucks for a simple cheese quesadilla. At least that price included a soda!

We walked from the Washington Monument across the rest of the mall to the Lincoln Memorial.
The Lincoln memorial is that building waaaaay off in the distance.

We passed the war memorials on the way. 
The World War II memorial.

The Vietnam Veterans Memorial.
I think this memorial is beautiful and Dallin enjoyed tracing the letters in the names of the soldiers.
He was busy finding all the "D" letters.

 The Korean War veterans memorial.
It was a very sobering experience to be reminded of the wars and all the people who fought to protect our country in those wars. I felt extreme gratitude for those soldiers, especially when surrounded by other tourists who seemed less than grateful. At the Korean War memorial, we overheard one person say, "Wow, they'll make a memorial for anything, won't they?" Yes, when hundreds of thousands of people go to war (including my own grandpa) to protect the freedom of others, I think that merits a memorial and a little respect. 


The Lincoln Memorial.
Connor seemed less than impressed by it. I think he was hot and sick of walking by this point. He was in the stroller for half the time, and carried on shoulders for another quarter of it, so I had little sympathy for his fatigue.

The view from the Lincoln Memorial, looking back across the mall to the Washington Monument. 

Last stop was the White House. 
It doesn't seem like it in the picture because of the zoom on the camera, but we were about 1/2 mile away from the White House. That is the closest we were allowed to get. (Seriously, I took one step closer on the grass across the imaginary line and was told by the secret service to step back please.) Apparently, they close the lawn in front of the White House for various security reasons at any given time. The secret service officer we talked to wasn't at liberty to say why, but just that it happens from time to time. Weird... 

On the walk back, we stopped to let Dallin get a Spongebob popsicle.
It was $3 (more food truck rip offs!!) but so worth it to see him enjoy it. It only took 5 baby wipes to clean up the resulting stickiness.

That was the end of our trip! Every day was long and exhausting (and hot!) but we got to see some really cool places learn a lot of American history. And we checked some things off our summer list!

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