Not quite into the city

Sunday, March 7th, 2010 | Liam, family

This weekend my cousin Jake came to visit us. He’s down at Yorktown for some Coast Guard training through the end of the month. I honestly don’t think I’ve seen him since late 2003, though he’s not a whole lot different than I remember. Older and more mature is all. Liam just stares like Jake’s the most interesting thing he’s seen all day. I kind of wanted to take him all the way into DC and show him the monuments, but our “quick” tour of Arlington Cemetery took two hours, and we didn’t even to go Grandpa Pete’s tomb. I feel sorry for not taking Jake to the Washington Mall, but I am not sure how I feel about not going to Grandpa’s grave site. Part of me feels like I failed to honor someone I really loved and part of me feels like I didn’t want to go to the site just to cry in front of my husband, 6 month old, and cousin. (Though restraining myself from doing just that while sitting here at the kitchen table typing is getting difficult.) Grandma sent me the visitor’s parking pass and the map to the mausoleum, and when we clocked it today we discovered that it’s only 8 miles from the apartment to the cemetery, so I’ll maybe go for some private time another day. I still occasionally wish that Grandpa was around to know Liam and William. One of my grandfathers was too selfish to have really built any type of relationship between us, but Grandpa Pete was an amazing grandpa and a genuinely good guy. I think he was like a second father to my dad and I know dad wants to be as interested and involved in Liam, Alyce, and Gibson’s lives as Grandpa Pete was in ours. We’re doing our best to make that happen from a distance. Skype is awesome — Liam loves to watch Grandma and Papa’s images talk to him.

Also, there are a lot of places I keep saying I want to visit in DC. I lived in Tennessee for almost a decade and never did half of the trails, parks, ect. I wanted to, so I don’t want to be lazy and not sightsee DC while I live here. If we had been a little more ambitious we could have walked across the bridge and seen the Lincoln Memorial. But the problem with DC is that everything looks closer than it really is. I discovered during a trip I made in highschool that it is not advisable to walk from site to site unless you’re 100% sure about the distance. I want to go to the Air and Space Museum, the International Spy Museum, the Baltimore Aquarium, and the Library of Congress. Liam was really good for this outing, so I think he’d be up for a museum. It’s just amazing to see how full of personality he is now.

1 Comment to Not quite into the city

Zeb
March 9, 2010

I hear you on the sight seeing thing. I’ve lived here since 1998 and there are still things I haven’t managed to do in DC, like ascend the Washington Monument or tour the White House.

As far as the Air and Space museum go, if you like that kind of stuff, then I STRONGLY recommend you add the Udvar-Hazy Annex to your list of “to do’s” as well. It’s not in town, it’s out by Dulles and it costs $12 to park there, but the museum itself is still free and WELL worth the price to park. That’s where they house the REALLY cool stuff, like an SR-71 Blackbird, the Enola Gay, and a space shuttle.

I also thoroughly enjoyed the Museum of Natural History and the National Archives.

I’m quite certain that if I were to investigate even just a little bit, there are probably things I don’t even know I want to go see.

As for a reasonably quick tour for non-local guests, I’d recommend what Amanda and I call “the loop” which basically starts on The Mall and walks you down to the Lincoln Memorial and back. Along the way you’ll also get the Washington Monument, the WWII Memorial, The Viet Nam Wall, and the Korean War Memorial, as well as some lesser known ones if you want to take the time to wander over and look. It also lets you get a glimpse of the Jefferson Memorial from across the river, but it’s too far to walk there. The loop should take a group of people taking their time between 3 and 4 hours to complete, which leaves time for one of the museums on the Mall too, if you time it right. For a slightly longer walking tour, instead of coming straight back to the Mall from the Lincoln Memorial, the White House is easily included in “the loop”, then you can walk back towards the Mall down Pennsylvania Avenue and at least look at the buildings for a few other notable sites on the way back, like the Navy Memorial.

The down side that we’ve found to this route is that, since it DOES give the most bang for the buck for guests who have a limited amount of time in town to see stuff, that’s what we almost always do when folks come here, so we’ve done it ourselves at least a half a dozen times.