Saturday night we ended up in Georgetown. It was extremely crowded . . .

(the line at DC Cupcakes)

and we were tired so we opted out of any shopping, and had a lovely dinner alongside the C&O canal.

After dinner we walked along the Potomac and across the Key Bridge back to Rossyln, VA where we were staying.

On Sunday, we met our good friends and spent the morning at the National Museum of the American Indian. It is a beautiful building that was designed after long conversations with many Native American groups. You can read about its design here.

We spent the afternoon at the American Art Museum. I was particularly interested in the Annie Leibovitz exhibit, “Pilgramage,” but also enjoyed a wonderful exhibit of models built in the early 1900’s that were a requirement of the patent application at that time.

After Susan and Eric left, we walked back to The Mall since we had not yet visited the World War II Memorial which had been built since we were last in Washington.

We walked over to the Washington Monument as well. 

By this time we were more than tired, but managed to get ourselves back to the Metro to return to our hotel. We had dinner in Arlington, and then drove to the Pentagon Memorial which was one of the most moving experiences of the trip. Each bench is named for a victim of the 9/11 disaster. If the victim was on the plane, the bench faces the Pentagon. If the victim was in the Pentagon, their bench faces outward. The benches are arranged by the age of the victims starting with the youngest (three years of age) and ending with the oldest victim (seventy-one). All the benches are illuminated at night.

I’m still working on some photos from our last day of this trip. We spent several hours in Frederick, MD and had a wonderful time. But we’re leaving tomorrow for two weeks in Oregon. I’m hoping to do a bit of blogging from there, but most of my reading of blogs will be on my iPad, so my comments may not be as frequent. I expect to spend a great deal of time holding a baby! 

It’s been two weeks since we returned from a four day weekend in Washington, D.C. and Frederick, MD. It’s taken me that long to go through the several hundred photos I took, and get them edited. I love Lightroom and how easy it is to keyword and organize all the photos. The editing tools are also great, although I know I am just skimming the surface in the way I can use them now. Nonetheless, editing photos in a new program took me quite a bit longer. I’m sure that will change when it becomes more automatic. I ended up with 54 photos from the Washington, D.C. part of the trip that I will print, and thought I would share a few of them here; some today, and some tomorrow so you won’t be on overload!

We got about an hour out of Rochester on Friday when our van started making a strange whining noise. After a bit of discussion, we decided to come home and switch cars. The van seems to be fine now, but it wasn’t worth the chance of being stranded in some unknown town with a car that didn’t work. The end result was we got to Washington much later than we expected so we had dinner in Alexandria, and went to the Container Store and called it a night.

Saturday we spent most of the day touring the memorials. We skipped a few we remembered well from our earlier trips, but made sure to see the new ones that have been built since we were last there. On our way from the Metro to the Mall we passed by the beautiful Memorial Bridge. Next time we go I hope to get a chance to take some photographs of the bridge from the Virginia side of the Potomac River.

Our first stop was at the Lincoln Memorial. It was really crowded with tourists but I managed to get a good shot of the remarkable statue without any one else in it. I also captured a few for our album with all the tourists as well.

The first new memorial we visited was the Martin Luther King Memorial. It, the FDR Memorial, and the Jefferson Memorial all overlook the Tidal Basin and there’s a lovely walking path from one to the next.

Martin Luther King Memorial

The Franklin D. Roosevelt Memorial is one of the larger memorials with four “rooms,” each representing one term of his time in office. Each room has a beautiful waterfall, and there are many statues and art work. One of the most fascinating was a wall of carvings. Each image represents a facet of the time when FDR was president.

This scupture of men waiting in a bread line during the Depression was particularly moving.

The smallest of the waterfalls, but my favorite.

Typically, the cherry blossoms would have been in bloom, but they had come and gone by the time we were there. The azaleas along the edge of the FDR Memorial were gorgeous.

On the far side of the Tidal Basin is the Jefferson Memorial. 

From there we walked to the Korean War Memorial. There are two walls with etchings, and a group of statues of soldiers who appear to be coming out of a woods. 

This image captures the etchings with the reflection of the soldiers who are across the walkway. I had to wait a while in order to get a shot without anyone walking along the wall.

After lunch we walked to Union Station, and then to the Capitol building. There was a long line to get tickets for a tour of the Capitol so we decided to wait until our next visit to do that.

One of the places I wanted to visit was the Old Post Office Building. You can take an elevator to the top of the clock tower and I managed to get my little point and shoot camera inbetween the bars on the windows to get a couple of aerial shots of Washington.

You can see that we had fabulous weather, warm (sometimes hot) and sunny the whole weekend. We walked about 10 miles both days so I was glad to have good weather.