THE CAPITAL IS IMPRESSIVE

These Blog posts are not up to date, but they are in order of how we experienced Washington DC. When we visited the Capital the cherry blossoms were still on the trees. The are gone now. High temperatures and a rainy day with brisk winds have taken them all away. When you approach the Capital from the west you are walking up a hill. The Capital was built on the high ground in the new city of Washington. Some people in the time of Dolly Madison called it the "City in the Swamp". The land around has now been drained, stabilized, and built on, but it's easy to see how it could have been swampy. You can't just walk up and go in the Capital. There is now a new visitor's center that everyone has to enter. We had registered ahead on line and had tickets for a guided tour at 1:40 p.m. We arrived about an hour early and checked in at the appropriate counter. The attendant suggested that if we wanted we could attach ourselves to the tour that was just entering. This tour was made up of people who had been standing in line for probably more than an hour just to get a ticket. Then they would have been standing in line for another hour to go on the tour. Our on line registration allowed us to bypass all those lines. That was the good news. The bad news was that the tour was not all that exciting. Since Congress was not in session, we were not allowed to enter or even look into the chambers. We got to see the old historic chambers and walk past the door of the Speaker of The House and had some interesting history conveyed to us by our tour guide, but that was about it. In the "Old House Chamber" there are statutes of historic figures on display. Each State chooses who they would like to display. Oregon has chosen Reverend Jason Lee, first missionary to Oregon. He happens to be a relative of a past neighbor of ours when we lived in Portland.