Like every morning of the trip, our alarms rang early, and we brought our luggage to the lobby if need be, gathered for breakfast, and boarded the bus. Most mornings, our bus left at or before 8 a.m.
We arrived at Mt. Vernon - as most of you know, George Washington's farm, by 10 a.m.
No wonder General Washington didn't want to be President. He loved his big, beautiful farm. I could tell, because all over the grounds, signs quoted the letters and journals in which he directed how the farm should run. He wrote about the orchards, the vegetables, the livestock, the foundries and fisheries. Mt. Vernon did have fisheries - the property slopes down to the Potomac River, and some years the shad harvest brought in more money than the cash crops.
We toured the mansion, but no photography allowed. The kitchen wasn't inside the house, however (typical - fire hazard).
We walked all over as many acres as we could. We peeked into the blacksmith shop, the weaving room, the horse barn and the tack room, walked down the hill to the Potomac, then back up, stopping at the Washington family's graves.
Back on the bus, we rode to D.C. When we arrived, we had time to visit the WWII Memorial before our tour of the Holocaust museum.
The monument is circular, with pools and a central fountain. Arched towers represent the War's geographic theaters, and pillars represent every State and Territory that sent soldiers to fight.
After the lovely, sunlit WWII Memorial, we visited the Holocaust Museum, which was somber, inside and out. The museum is artfully designed, thoroughly informative, a must-see for anyone curious about the subject and not a place for pictures. We departed feeling sick about man's inhumanity to man.
After supper at D.C.'s beautiful downtown train station, we drove to the Tidal Basin, and took a night tour of the surrounding monuments and memorials.
If you ever want to lose your mind, try keeping track of your 13-year-old son amid throngs of people, most of them aged thirteen, while walking in an unlit area at night. Correction: there's lighting, but it's all directed at the monuments. I didn't take many photos.
I caught Martin Luther King...
...photographed the Washington Monument from across the water...
...and don't remember much about the FDR Memorial because I couldn't track my kid in the dark. My kid, mind you, had no interest in being tracked.
Someone took a shot of Moon Pie and me, with the Jefferson Memorial in the background. We walked to it, too, but as we reached it my phone and camera batteries both died. It was gorgeous, anyway.
End day two!
