Friday, July 8th, 2011

Today we had tickets at 10:15 to the National Archives so after breakfast we walked there. They actually let us in at 10:00 when it opened so we were there when there was nobody else, which was nice. There was no line or crowd to see the Declaration of Independence or the Preamble to the Constitution. There was also a letter from George Washington (Genevieve’s National Geographic Kids magazine says that this is the most valuable letter in the world, worth $3.5 Million) and a letter from Abraham Lincoln and it was really cool to see their actual handwriting. Lincoln had really nice script! We got a replica Declaration of Independence and the Constitution as well as some cute patriotic earrings and quill pens at the gift shop.

Next we went to the National Museum of Natural History because the girls wanted to go to the butterfly exhibit there. Us girls went to see the Hope diamond and Mark went to see the dinosaurs. Next we went to the butterflies and paid the small fee to get inside. The girls liked this a lot. Afterwards we went saw the insect exhibit where the girls got to hold a tomato hornworm. We also visited the Early Human exhibit, and then it was time to go in search of lunch.

We walked to the downtown area, and had Mexican fast food at Qdoba, then visited the Ford’s Theater which was interesting. I hadn’t realized the guy that shot Lincoln was a famous actor! After that we went to the Spy Museum, which was one of the museums the kids had picked from the kids’ travel book we’d gotten them before the trip. They really liked it, especially climbing in the air duct to spy on the people below, and it was interesting to see all of the spy gear and stuff. There was a lot to see here, and we didn’t get to it all because as you can imagine at this point we were getting a little tired. It had started to rain, so we ran to the nearest metro station and took the metro back to our hotel, where the girls went swimming.

By dinner time it had stopped raining, and while we were at the pool Mark had looked up a potential dinner restaurant. We walked the other way (away from the mall) and over to the Waterfront where we had dinner at Jenny’s Asian Fusion. Kind of a funky place, a little past it’s prime decor-wise but the food was good and the service was excellent. We had hoped to see fireflies on our way back to the hotel but no luck.

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