East Coast Trip part 8: Washington DC day 2

Tuesday morning we woke up to another yummy breakfast and then headed back into the city. Tuesday it was supposed to rain so we planned indoor activities for the majority of the day.  It was a good thing we walked the mall and saw all the monuments the day before.

Our first stop was the White House. I don't care if you like the president or not, this is a historic house and a lot of very important things have happened here and its pretty cool to be there and think of all those things. It was nice though because it was early so there weren't protesters or too many tourists out yet.

The back of the White House from the washington monument

The first museum of the day was the American History Museum. We've been here before but this time 2 of the sides were closed. The first floor was new but its under renovation on the other two floors. Since we knew what we liked, we just looked at what we're interested in and then just sat and waited for Stacey and Doug to look at the other exhibits.

We started out learning about Presidential history. It was one of the more interesting sections of the museum and one of the biggest.

Lincoln's hat he was wearing when he died

 We also saw some of the dresses worn by the First Ladies of the country. Just Stacey and I looked at these while the guys waited.

On the second floor we found a statue of George Washington and an exhibit dedicated to the Star Spangled Banner. I wasn't feeling well so we didn't go inside this exhibit. The flag they had outside was really pretty though.

The next area was all about the history of transportation. It had boats, trains and cars. Its a huge area and has a lot of cool stuff. Mike and Josh had a lot of fun playing with the mannequins. Mike and Joshua's favorite area was the inventions which I admit was really cool. I wish we had started there so we wouldn't have been so tired by that point.

Once we were done Stacey and Doug got lunch while Mike, Josh and I headed over to the Natural History museum. This is my favorite smithsonian, I only wish I had been feeling better that day. One benefit to going to these museums a lot was that we've seen everything. Since the dinosaur section is being renovated I was pretty disappointed. We really liked all of the ocean creatures and information on the first floor though.

Giant squid

They do have two of the dinosaurs on display right now and lucky for us they happen to be our favorites. The T-Rex and the triceratops :) so even though I felt awful, this cheered me up a bit.

When we left the museum we found out it was raining so we walked back to the car in the rain. On the way we stopped at Ford's Theater. We didn't go inside but it was pretty cool to see and we saw the house across the street where Lincoln died after he was shot.

On our way out of DC we drove by Union Station. Its an awesome looking building.

It took a while to get out of the city because the traffic was awful but once we did we had a nice relaxing night before driving back to SC. It was a great trip but exhausted doesn't even begin to describe how I felt by Tuesday night. It was really nice to have a rest day on Thursday before going down to Charleston.