Tika and me in DC

The end of the school year I spent a day chaperoning Samantha's class on a field trip to DC. It was a cool field trip in that it was focused on the mall but required the kids to answer a list of questions about things in and around the mall. A couple of weeks later myself and Tika spent at Saturday afternoon at the Corcoran Gallery and we talked about the field trip and Tika said that there were a lot of places in DC that she had not been to so we planned a day for just the two of us to go see some places in DC that we had not seen or that it had been a while since we had been there.

Our day started with tea at Teaism, a place we both like for lunch but it was too early for that. After we were caffeinated we headed off to the National Archives - which neither of us had been to. The lines were short early in the morning and we got to spend a couple of hours looking at the collections there as well as the architecture, such as the Rotunda. Since Tika enjoys history, and does well at it (a 5 out of 5 in her AP History exam last semester) she had lots of things to talk about. We saw the Bill of Rights, Constitution and Declaration of Independence but also things like drawings for the initial lunar lander and Shaq's shoe that he gave to the president.

After we left the Archives we walked over to the Canadian Embassy and saw an exhibit of Yosuf Karsh's photography as well as played in the echo chamber before walking up and around Capitol Hill on our way to the Library of Congress. The Library was also a place I had never been to. We were hoping to get to actually go into the library but we found out you need to be doing research to get in so we toured the building, looked into the library through the viewing area, saw the Jefferson Library and exhibits on Gershwin and Bob Hope.

Once we left the Library we were getting hungry so we walked over to Union Station, one of my favourite buildings in DC and had lunch. We spent some time walking through the station, since it is such a beautiful building, before we headed over to the National Building Museum. I guess by now you can tell we both like architecture :-)

After touring the Building Museum we headed back home. We were fortunate not to get rained on but we were also fortunate enough to take advantage of living so close to so many fantastic things to see and do.

I am looking forward to keeping up that tradition.

..... cu