The Nation's Capitol

Washington D.C. I was a little afraid to come here after all the news I had heard regarding theft and burglary, but after some research, it seemed it was likely overblown like it usually is. However, in order to stay at the hostel inside of town, I was going to have to leave my car outside of town, as even if I wanted to pay the exorbitant price for overnight parking inside the city, my car would not fit inside a parking garage with the storage box on top. Now this is where I was worried. However my research revealed that though there were quite a few burglaries from the three big parking garages that offered overnight parking, when taken into account the vast number of cars that were parked there every day, the probability was actually quite low. So I chose the one with the lowest number of incidents and drove to the Huntington parking garage on the southwest side of the city. After sleeping in my car overnight and not once noticing any suspicious characters lingering around or sauntering by and no broken glass to be seen, I deemed it safe enough to chance leaving my car, with nearly ALL of my worldly possessions aboard, for at least one night. Thus started my second two day non-stop walking and running adventure for the week.

One thing about the Nation's Capitol is the beauty of the architecture.

For just about every building around downtown.

Big clocks and beautiful stonework are par for the course.

And of course, the Occupy movement was here in force.

Oddly, this was one of the few darker colored buildings that I saw.

Here is the famous White House! Hi Barrack!

And again from the east side.

The Natural History Museum was quite amazing.

Besides all of the cool, dinosaur bones, there was tons to see and lots to learn!

 

This Smithsonian building was the coolest of all! From the outside at least...

The Smithsonian art museum was surprisingly interesting. I absolutely adored all of the paintings of nature stemming from the mid 19th century.

The sculpture gardens were quite cool, but they had nothing on this one, located a few blocks from the HI hostel. You're the man, MJ!

This tree, however, was my favorite "natural sculpture".

The Capitol Building, in all its splendor.

Oklahoma! Being represented at the WWII Memorial.

The Reflecting Pool. Not doing too much reflecting at the moment... 

The Lincoln Memorial was huge!

The Air and Space Museum was way cool. And, like all the other Smithsonian buildings, totally free. Sweet!

And lastly, I stopped by George Washington's crib on my way out of town, but this was all I could see without paying one of those exorbitant fees.

All in all, it was a great trip. I met some awesome people at the hostel (as usual) and had some great beers and food for relatively cheap prices. Though I did have an interesting night. After getting back in from the bars, I walk into a room that feels like a blast furnace. After an hour or so of trying to get them to fix it (they couldn't...), I'm lucky enough to get another room. This room, thankfully, is the perfect temperature! I'm psyched. It's 3am, but I'm finally going to get to sleep... and that's when the simultaneous snoring started up from the other occupants of the room! Ugghhh... if it wasn't for the great company I always seem to meet at these places, I'd prefer to sleep in my car.