Last few days in DC

I thoroughly enjoyed a trip out to Arlington National Cemetery the other day, contrary to my first thoughts of visiting another cemetery. I guess if you're going to Washington DC and are going to visit any cemeteries at all, Arlington is the one to see. I did learn some things about the place that I had not known. The land that the cemetery occupies was originally the estate of Robert E. Lee's family. The north seized and occupied that property during the civil war and started using it to bury war dead and that started the ball rolling. Now its quite the place to see, acre after acre of crosses. The hill overlooking the land is where the house that Robert E. Lee used to live in stands and that is now a kind of museum piece that you can walk through. The park service runs it and they were in the middle of some restoration while we were there.

From the hill you can look out toward the Jefferson Monument and the view is nice as you can see in the second picture. You're looking across the Potomac River but the Washington Monument and Capitol are to the left out of the picture.


Yesterday we took the Metro out to Alexandria and saw that town. It's very old and was first surveyed by good old George Washington when he was a teen. I guess that makes it quite old. There are many of the old buildings still standing since brick was the building material of choice and some of them were very interesting to me since they dated back to the 1700's. Some of the old cobblestone streets still exist too, but mostly in the ally's as you can see in this picture.

We started at the warf along the Potomac River and walked back up to the Metro and tried to visit as many of the old sights as we could without making too many detours. The old City Hall was built in the 1700's and is still used today even though there have been some renovations. We went inside and looked around a little but since it is still being used we didn't stay too long.

This picture of the City Hall was taken from across King Street looking over the courtyard. They had a flag on the building for some reason, or maybe it's there all the time, I don't know. Nevertheless we had a wonderful day poking around in some of the old churches and looking at all the old headstones of the people buried there, many dating back to the 1700's.

We head back to Utah on Wednesday so this is the last weekend here in DC. I'm not sure what we are going to do for the few days we have left, we saw almost everything we could think of except maybe Mt Vernon. Both of us have been pretty tired lately since we are going somewhere each day I guess so maybe we will just take it easy, we'll see.

Great Falls

Yesterday Karen's brother Steve suggested that we borrow their bikes and go riding along the tow road that goes along the C & O Canal. The old road is now a nice hiking/biking trail that runs from Georgetown going north. It passes a place called Great Falls which was a place we had been told was a cool place to visit so we walked out the trail that overlooks the falls. They have an interpretive sign there that explains why the falls are there so I took a picture of it.

I saw people fishing along the shore but even though we saw some fish in the water, I have no idea what species are in there. The ones we saw looked like bluegill or maybe perch but I also saw a guy bottom fishing so there might be catfish in there too. It was a wonderful day and there were people playing in the water and kayaking but it wasn't warm enough for me to go swimming.

One thing it was warm enough to do was bike riding and walking and that's what we did. As you can see from the last picture, the trail is flat and as wide as the Bizz Johnson trail in Susanville and that was a good thing because there were a ton of people out there enjoying the day. As we rode along the trail we saw several species of turtle sunning on the logs, some of them were quite large and that was pretty cool to see.

The National Park service runs the park where we drove in and they maintain the trail system. They also have a boat that they run through the locks with passengers on it and the folks running it dress in the garb of the day. I took a couple of pictures of it but I'm not putting any on here right now. The canal was originally created to move goods and they towed the boats along with mules or horses, thus the tow road. A very cool day, thanks Steve!