Washington D.C. Friday, Oct 17

 First on the agenda for Friday, was to go up in the Washington Monument.  We got there about 8:15 and lined up to get tickets. This was not on our original "things to do list".  However, some friends of ours from our condo community let us know about a landscape portrait done by Jose Rodriquez.  Our friends are immigrants from Cuba and know the artist's father -also from Cuba.  The portrait is best seen from the Washington monument.

 The face is a composite of dozens of photographs the artist took of people on the Mall.  The title of the portrait is "Out of Many-One"

 It was very cool and we are glad we got to see it. We walked down the mall through the WWII Memorial and over to the Vietnam Memorial.  I don't know why but the Vietnam Memorial hits me the hardest.  I don't know if it is because my brother fought in Vietnam or because you see people looking for specific names....

We only did a drive by of the Lincoln memorial because it was the one thing we did on our last visit several years ago when it was 6 degrees.

 After the lincoln memorial, we rented bikes from the 
 Capital Bike share kiosk- 7 bucks for 24 hours, and there are kiosks everywhere.    

 We rode to Arlington cemetery and through Ladybird Johnson park.  There was not a kiosk to lock up the bike so we decided to come back to Arlington later in the day.  We rode to the FDR Memorial- really well done!

 We visited the MLK memorial.  I also thought this one was really well done.  Then we rode the bikes around the tidal pool to the Jefferson Memorial.

 After the Jefferson Memorial. it was off to the White house.  We parked the bikes on the north side and then walked all the way around. The south side view was the best.

 After the long walk around the White House, we found a metro station and rode back to Arlington.  We walked up to the JFK grave site.

 There were two funerals going on and we watched on procession come up the hill.  

 We hit happy hour at McCormick and Schmicks.  They have a good one and we had walked and biked so much, on so little food, that we tried about everything on the happy hour menu.  Catherine's pedometer  logged a very busy day.

I will blog about Saturday and Sunday - in a couple of days.  We got home Sunday and have been busy with volunteering and catching up with the neighbors.