...or anyone else who may be reading this blog. I am writing you from Washington DC! Today was our first full day here and it has been so amazing and fun so far! I apologize for the lack of pictures on this and the following posts this week, I am using the computer in the lobby of our hotel and I don't want to take too much time. Now if I had an Acer Mini, that would be a different story... ;) Well, yesterday we made the long trek from Salt Lake City to the East coast. We flew from SLC to Denver then on to Washington DC. The flights weren't terribly long (nothing is anymore after flying to and from Argentina!) but we dealt with quite a bit of turbulence. I guess that just makes the flight more of an adventure. We arrived to DC last night and caught the Metro to our hotel. We are staying in the Marriott Residence Inn and we girls have 2 room suites with2 bathrooms, a living room and a full kitchen! Sure beats what we thought we were getting which was 2 people to a bed and 4 girls to one bathroom. We are living in luxury! We ended our long day of travel last night with a devotional as a group and "family" prayer together. Today started early and felt even earlier to us West-coasters. We were out of the hotel (after cashing in on their yummy free breakfast) at 8:00am. The first stop of the day was the Department of the Veterans Affairs. We met with 2 administrators there who talked about the 180-somthing VA hospitals in the USA. They are heavily involved in breaking research and new procedures. They are particularly focused on prosthetics, mental health and cardiac care. It was neat to be able to visit there. From the Department of the VA we went to the Pentagon and got to have a tour of the building. It is high security there! In order to receive entrance into the building we had to reserve the tour weeks ahead of time. We all had federal background checks and when we were inside the building we walked in single file with a soldier leading and a soldier following. It was a great tour and our guide was an Air Force air traffic controller from Salt Lake City! Small world. We saw many interesting displays there but I had two favorites. One was the corridor dedicated to the 5 five star generals in our nation's history. Most of the corridor was dedicated to General Douglas MacArthur. I have recently been able to learn a lot about MacArthur because Mitchell just read a biography about him. You would have loved it Honey! They even had his own WWI uniform! The other exhibit I liked a lot was the September 11th memorial. We went to the place in the building where the plane crashed and there is a memorial set up for the 186? people who were killed in the attack. The feeling there is so much like the feeling at ground zero in New York City. You can certainly feel that it is sacred ground. The Pentagon has been under renovation since around 1994 to reenforce it with steel beams. The area of the building that was hit in 2001 had actually already been renovated which stopped the plane from tearing all the way through the building and out the other side. To me that speaks a lot of the care and love our Heavenly Father has for all of his children. Of course, He will never take our agency away from us but in a great act of compassion He made it possible that the damage would be far less than it could have been. The Pentagon, we learned, is the largest low-rise building in the USA! The inner courtyard is big enough to fit the entire Capitol! After the Pentagon tour we stopped for a needed food break and enjoyed sitting for a little while. After lunch we all enjoyed a 3 hour trolley tour of numerous downtown attractions. I think we all loved the trolley tour! At least I did! We saw the Capitol, the White House, the Supreme Court building, the Library of Congress, the Washington Monument, The Jefferson Monument, The Lincoln Memorial, the WWI and WWII Memorials, the Cathedral, many of the Embassies (the Iranian Embassy is vacant and all boarded up, interesting) we saw so many other things that I can't even remember now! We drove through Georgetown which is the oldest neighborhood in DC. Originally in Georgetown the homes were not taxed based on squarefootage but on the length of property on the street, hence the homes all share side walls and are extremely narrow! There was one townhouse we saw that truly could not have been more than 8 feet wide. It has 2 bedrooms and one bathroom and sold for $560,000! Sounds like you got yourself a great deal Uncle Chris!! We had planned on being at the Lincoln Memorial (for reference see the tails side of a penny) tonight at sunset but we decided to come back for dinner on account of extreme hunger, fatigue and rain. This city is so much fun and there is so much to see! I had no idea that all of the 19 Smithsonian Museums, including the National Zoo, are all free entrance! How cool is that!?! One of our trolley guides said that if a person were to spend 1 minute at each exhibit in each of the Smithsonian Museums it would take 35 years to see them all! I will definitely be returning someday!
Tomorrow we have planned to go to the Walter Reed Medical Center (largest of all of the VA hospitals). There we will have the opportunity to talk with a panel of nurses there, tour the facility and even talk with some of the patients! We will be going to the prosthetics department to see their advanced technology. I am excited for this! We were told that we will see soldiers who have been in Iraq or other places in the Middle East conflict. Nowadays the soldiers who are injured arrive back in Washington DC within 36 hours from leaving their duty stations. This means we will be seeing service men and women who are fresh from the front lines. We are looking forward to greeting them and thanking them for their brave service. This experience really brings personal meaning to "Land of the Free and Home of the Brave."
Tomorrow we will also be touring some of the monuments here and going to the Smithsonian Museum of American History. So far this trip has been wonderful!
I will try to keep you posted and many pictures to come next week!
I miss you Babe!
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