My wife has never been to DC. Neither has my younger son. I haven’t been since I was a teenager. A lot has happened in our nation’s capitol in the last thirty years, much of it tainted and overshadowed by the last seven years and a certain former president’s corrupt administration. So when we decided to go visit for a week this month, I felt … weird. It didn’t feel like the same trips I took as a kid, filled with awe and respect and nostalgia for everything our country has gone through and fought for to get where we are today. It felt more like traveling to a former war zone, the way it might feel if we had instead planned on visiting Berlin, for instance, or Checkpoint Charlie, or Auschwitz.
We made the drive to Virginia and stayed with our older son, a trip that, according to Apple Maps, should take us just over six hours, but which actuality took just over eight hours after factoring in gas stops and rest stops to eat and stretch our legs, and of course bathroom breaks every hour because my wife has a bladder the size of a pea.
The trip was wonderful though. My wife took pictures of the state welcome signs as we drove through — Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Maryland, and Virginia. We played songs on our playlists and sang along. We ate snacks and talked and laughed. We planned out the places we wanted to go. On the first day, we drove to the Air and Space Museum. The large exhibit in the Smithsonian around The Mall is currently under construction, so we hit the smaller exhibit at Dulles instead. I say smaller, but it was still too much for us to see in one afternoon. (At some point in the future, we’ll drive down to the museum at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, which none of us have ever been to.) We saw the space shuttle Discovery, which we learned has flown over 150 million miles. We saw the Enola Gay, the WWII B-29 bomber that dropped the world’s first atomic bomb on Hiroshima. (Its sister plane, Bockscar, which dropped the bomb on Nagasaki, is housed at Wright-Patterson.) We saw the SR-71 Blackbird, the fastest plane ever, which took off from Los Angeles and landed in DC in just over one hour, traveling at 2,124 mph.
On the second day of our trip, we got tickets through our senator’s office to tour the Capitol building. The tour itself felt rushed, and there weren’t actually all that many places that our guide took us. We saw the rotunda and the crypt and the house and senate hallways and lots of paintings and statues. The real highlight of that trip, at least for me, happened before our tour. My wife and younger son went to the Capitol building to get our tour passes, while my older son and I hoofed it a few blocks down the street to our senator’s office to pick up our House and Senate chamber passes. Apparently you have to pick those up separately and in-person at the senate office. Our tour started at 9:50, and his senate office didn’t open until 9:00, and they recommend that you be in line for your tour thirty minutes early. Needless to say, we were cutting it pretty close. We huffed and puffed into the office for our passes and explained what a rush we were in. So the two young men who were working in the office helped us out by taking us over to the Capitol building on the senate train in the underground tunnel, which was super cool! After our tour was over, we sat up in the galleries of the House and Senate Chambers for a bit before heading back out.
I had requested tickets to tour the Pentagon, but apparently that was a no-go because you have to request tickets several weeks in advance and they were all booked up. Same went for touring the White House. Bummer. But as luck would have it, my son goes to church with a guy who works at the Pentagon, and when he heard how disappointed we were, he was all, “Well I can give you a personal tour if you want.” Heck yes! No photos from that tour though because that place is locked down tight. But he walked us through all the hallways for the different military branches, and we saw the offices for all the various chiefs of staff. He also took us down to the Pentagon Athletic Center, where I bought some swag — a gym shirt and pair of shorts — to wear during my weekly workouts at the Y.
For the rest of the week, we toured various museums — The International Spy Museum, the American Indian Museum, the US Botanical Garden — we hit a local swimming pool, and we swam in Chesapeake Bay, where my youngest son got stung by a jellyfish. We also drove up to Annapolis and spent an afternoon walking the brick streets of the old downtown and eating ice cream in the hot afternoon sun. It was a really great vacation. I learned some things I didn’t know before, got to do some stuff I never would have done otherwise, and made lots of fun memories and stories to talk about and share with others. Most important, we successfully dispelled the misty gloom we had imagined hanging over the place and were able to really kick back and enjoy ourselves.
There is definitely more to do in DC than you could ever possibly get through in a single week, and we’re looking forward to getting back there again some time and seeing other sites. We never even made it to the Washington Monument or Lincoln or Jefferson Memorials or Arlington Cemetery or Mount Vernon or Monticello, and I’d really like to see those places.
Have you ever been to DC? What were your favorite places? Let me know in the comments below.
