Oh say can you see...

 We have arrived in Washington DC and we were completely captured by the sights and history of this wonderful city! 
We met up with Rob and Jenna again on the L' Enfant stop on the metro early Tuesday morning and didn't waste any time starting our sightseeing adventure!
 The first stop was the Smithsonian Air and Space museum which included actual artefacts from the famous Apollo 11 - first man on the moon mission. We actually got to see Neil Armstrong’s space suit which was awesome!
 Next stop - the Capitol building which is the central building of Washington DC. It was built early 1800's by African American slaves, it was burnt down by the British during the Revolutionary War and re-built, and the "dome" called the rotunda was expanded and re-built in the middle of the civil war.
The building as it currently stands is the meeting place for both the American Congress - House of Representatives and the Senate, in fact the senate was actually meeting on the day we went for the Capitol building tour. The rotunda is about 28 stories high and the dome itself weighs approximately 900 million pounds. It is filled with statues of deceased congress men and woman and other recognised political figures including some past presidents. The architecture alone is just incredible not to mention the paintings, marble columns and floors. You could spend an entire day in that building. After our tour we went through an underground tunnel to the Congress library and held 2 bibles that were 500 years old! This building was amazing also!
We boarded a double Decker tour to the Lincoln Memorial, we had lunch at the national park and then went up to see the memorial. Just the splendour of the memorial itself gave me Goosebumps, and to read excerpts of some of President Lincoln's famous speeches engraved on the walls was just inspiring! The memorial faces onto the Washington Monument (you will know this monument from the movie Forrest Gump where he runs across that massive stretch of water screaming out "Jenny" - it's that long brick thing sticking straight up into the sky) however all of the water had been drained as they are re-doing the base, so it looked a little drab. We walked from the Lincoln memorial to see the WWII memorial which is huge, and the whole memorial is a fountain depicting the Pacific and Atlantic oceans and 50 separate monuments with the names of each of the 50 states engraved in stone. Jenna and I took off our shoes and had a little paddle in the water taking in the sights, it was just incredible.
We when walked up past the Washington Monument and crossed the road to see the White House! Obviously something was occuring that day as the whole parameter was barricaded (we are told more than usual) and there were Secret Service Police EVERYWHERE not to mention the SAS snipers on the roof of the white house! We managed to get a few photos. We caught the metro to Union station and made our way down town for some dinner! One more day of DC sightseeing before we hit the big apple!