Travelling Diaries
2011 USA Coast to Coast trip / Day 5+6-Washington DC
Previous and next: Day 4 New York / Day 7+8 Chicago
25th June 2011
DC but not PC…
Up
early (5.30am) on Saturday as our bags were to be collected from our room at
6am for transfer to Penn station for our train journey to Washington DC. We
met with the other Tourettes on the bus, the first time we had been back
together for a couple of days. It felt like a reunion tour...
We boarded the train at Penn Station at around 9am. This was our first real train on this Great Train Journey of ours (we can’t really count the London Underground or the New York subway as these weren’t part of the official trip). The train was clean and tidy with all of the seats facing in the direction of travel. What seemed strange at first was the amount of generous space you were given on the train. The seats were enormous with plenty of leg room. But then we realised that anyone of any size in America (which seems like a lot) probably struggled to travel by airplane. Therefore the trains were mostly catering for them.
The
train stopped at places such as New Jersey, Philadelphia, and Delaware. At
one point Karen spotted some derelict housing, mostly boarded up with the
occasional youth hanging on the street corner. She thought it was so
reminiscent of the television series The Wire. Which, of course it
was, as we were looking at Baltimore where the series was based and filmed
(see pic right).
We arrived in Washington DC at around half past twelve. The weather was much fresher than what we had left at New York. Although it wasn’t bright sunshine at least it wasn’t raining and the humidity was better.
On arrival at Washington DC station (see pic
right) all of us Tourettes
were loaded into a bus and were treated to a guided tour by a local woman.
Our guide did not look like a tour guide (although, to be honest I’m not sure what a tour guide should look like). She looked like a retired school mistress, and, boy, did she talk like one. She started off our tour by asking where we were all from (UK and Ireland) and then told us that she had just spent the previous four days giving guided tours for Scottish school kids. The tour that came after obviously followed the same script the school kids had probably been given. We mature adults were treated to a primary school history lesson along with elementary questioning about America. Granted, our knowledge on the subject was probably at about the level of a primary school child. However, her style of delivery had to be heard to be believed.
Don’t
get me wrong, the guided tour wasn’t bad. In fact I found it very
informative and she obviously knew her stuff. However, as were at the front
of the bus we could hear the off-microphone conversation she was having with
the driver as she was barking instructions to him on which lane he should be
in and when he should be indicating and stopping etc. To be honest, I felt
sorry for the driver as, after 25 years of marriage, I knew exactly how he
felt.
Anyway, our tour took in all of the DC highlights. We took in Capitol Hill (pic right- which was being prepared for the July 4th celebrations, down the National Mall passing many of the Smithsonian Museums. We went to the Southside of the White House (see thumbs below outside the railings) and saw a glimpse of Michelle Obama’s famous vegetable garden (Karen was very envious but suspects yer woman probably gets more help than she does).
We
then crossed the Potomac River to Arlington cemetery. This was sombre and
impressive with it’s vast number of white headstones. We then went to the
Air Force memorial with an interesting sculpture. Karen had her usual
liberal twinges about the message we were told it represented. We also saw
the Pentagon and the FBI headquarters (just as we had watched them on the
X-Files all those years ago).
The tour then moved to the famous Iwo Jima statue of the soldiers raising the American flag. Again, it was powerful and one we know so well. However, Maya Linn’s Vietnam Veteran’s memorial close to it, although simpler, was far more moving. When we arrived it was crowded and hot, but the images we saw will stay with us.
The memorial is a simple wall with listings of the thousands of names of those who died or were missing in action in Vietnam. As we walked along we saw many people looking for the names of loved ones, or just people they knew. They each had lists of where there particular names should be; which wall, which block of names, which line. Occasionally people struggled to find what they were looking for. We saw one middle aged man ask someone one of the many volunteers there to help him find a particular name. When they found it for him he just stopped and stared at the name and touched it with his fingertips. You could see that the moment was an emotional one for him. Others were taking rubbings of the names they found to take home and remember.
Not far away was the Women’s memorial which seemed a little sentimental and overt in contrast to what we had just witnessed.
Finally our tour brought us to the Lincoln Memorial. This is a huge structure with a lot of history (Martin Luther King's famous “I have a dream” speech was made here). The interior has the huge statue of Abraham Lincoln which is supposed to loom over a reflecting pool (which was currently drained for repairs). Carved into the walls are the words of Lincoln’s famous Gettysburg address (but no zip code, I noticed – though somebody did point out the one spelling mistake to me – Google it).
26th June 2011
Sunday, Sunday...
Today
was another ‘free’ day. As we are still at the relative start of our journey
we didn’t want to over do the tourism bit, so we started by a walk around
near the Capitol, just to get a feel for the place. (See my impersonation of
an Austrian bier keller owner on the right).
It is great to see the green spaces in front of the Capitol building being used for sports, games and public enjoyment (see below).
We then went to visit the Air and Space Museum. On the way in you get a chance to touch a bit of moon rock! As a 10 going on 11 year old back in 1969, the moon landings had been an important event in my life. I had been an avid reader of science fiction and the whole idea of this fiction being turned into reality (some say allegedly!) was something that all boys of my age found incredible. We all wanted to be astronauts when we grew up. The whole space race and science behind it was probably what got me interested in computing, even in those early days. And the fact that there was a race between Russia and the USA made it even more of a story to follow. Anyway, here was a chance to see some of the memorabilia that had been so important to me all those years ago.
The
picture on the right is the two of next to the actual Apollo 11 command
module, and the one below shows the LEM that landed on the moon.
As married life is all about compromise, after the laddish Air and Space museum (although Karen did enjoy the satellite imagery section) we visited one of the National Gallery of Art. The restaurant is under the linking concourse between the older and the newer Galleries and designed by I. M. Pei. Here is me with a face full of food. Charming! (It was pepperoni pizza, in case you were wondering). This is the underground bit of the concourse and the next images show what it is like from above - triangular light wells and a cascade of water.
There was interesting work in the gallery (but Karen is saving most of her energy for Chicago). David thought what he saw was a load of Pollocks... and he was right. Here's one.
and one painting that immediately brought back the visit to Marcus's studio and his work, This time the work of Rackstraw Downes, see below.
Looked at the exterior of the "Newseum" - a news media museum. Outside it displays the front cover of one current daily newspaper from every State in the US.
To finish off we went to Georgetown. This is one of the oldest parts of the city, pre-dating Washington DC. Very different in terms of scale and architecture. Its canal could be in Huddersfield or Salford!. (see below).
A further selection of photos can be found by clicking here.
This is our last night in Washington DC. Tomorrow is our long overnight rail journey to Chicago!
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