When we left off on my last blog post "Trip Day 1", we were in Washington DC, and I just had David's Cookies for lunch. (For the record, it was really good, if you're in the area try it :P)
After lunch, we went to the International Spy Museum. It is a relatively new museum and most people were excited for it. It turned out not to be that great for me, though. It was mainly James Bond themed and since I had never really seen any of the James Bond movies, it wasn't really interesting to me. After we went through all the exhibits, I stopped by the gift shop. Unfortunately, since we were in Washington DC, I couldn't find a hat for less than $15 or a key chain for less than $5. A couple people did buy laser pointers, switchblade combs and handcuffs. When we got back onto the bus, Mr. Tonic lectured us about how we shouldn’t bring any of those items to any of the monuments and we should just keep them in the bottom of our bags where we couldn’t get in trouble with them. Something about how a student from another school on another trip used a laser pointer on the White House and the secret service interrogated everyone for hours.
After the International Spy Museum, we were bussed on down to the mall. We first went to the Vietnam Memorial. It's made up of three parts. The first one is the wall which has all the names on it. Our tour guide pointed out that some names had stars next to them and that meant that the person went missing. The second part was a statue of three soldiers holding guns. The guide pointed out that it was meant to represent diversity because the people were three different races. The third part was a statue of three women around a wounded soldier. They represented hope, faith and charity.
Next we went to the Korean War Memorial. It had a wall with 3D engravings on it. It also had nineteen stone soldiers that reflected off a mirror to show the soldiers lost from North and South Korea during the war.
We then went to the Lincoln Memorial. Mr. Google Search told us there was a typo in the speeches inside. So in the 15 minutes that we had, everyone ran into the Memorial to look, Mrs. Smith among them. At the end of the 15 minutes, no one could find it, except for Shirley who said it when everyone was crowded around. It says "uture", not "future" in the Gettysburg Address. You may remember that Shirley beat me in the spelling bee last year and the science fair the year before.
After Lincoln, we went to the FDR memorial. It was my favorite even though most of the waterfalls weren't working. It was all handicapped accessible and there was even a section with Braille. As a monument, it was different from all the others that we had seen. I can't say exactly why it was my favorite, but it was. Check it out yourself. Then we went to the Martin Luther King Memorial. It was huge and had speeches all along the sides. I was looking for the famous "I have a Dream Speech" on the wall, but could not find it. The last memorial of the day was the Jefferson Memorial. It was huge and very traditional.
Then we had Hamburger Hamlet. They were yelling at us because we were too loud. It was ironic that they yelled at us, because they made it louder. We went back to the hotel at around 9:00. We ended up watching basketball for most of the night. The best part was that I got the bed :). The next morning Mikey woke up really grumpy because he had to sleep on the floor, even though everyone else had to too.
It was our last day in DC. We got hotel breakfast: French toast but unfortunately no bacon :(. There was bad news that morning; Mr. Tonic looked tired and grumpy. Four girl rooms got in trouble because they made noise at 1:00am, all were told to settle down. One of the rooms didn't settle down, the security guard woke up Mr. Tonic and he had to reprimand the girls at 2:00am. To compare, five boys' rooms (not us) were reprimanded and stopped on the first warning. As punishment after breakfast, no one on the bus was allowed to sleep when we drove to DC.
In DC, we went to the White House and got a group picture taken. It took us a while because all of the other groups were doing the same thing. After that, we went to the Holocaust Museum. At school we had been prepared for what to expect here. We went to an exhibit called "Daniel's Story", especially created for students like us.
Then, we had lunch and since of the long lines, I had David's Cookies again. This time there was a lot of my friends who got it too. After lunch we walked around a bit and then went to the Air and Space Museum. It was nice but everyone was so tired we just sat around waiting to go home.
We then started on the LONG bus ride home. After about an hour of being bored on a bus with wifi that worked just well enough that you could get the website before the internet would give you that patented "this page cannot load" sign, we got off and had dinner. We went to this place called Old Country Buffet along the side of the road. The food was great and people weren't screaming at us to be quiet, which was a definite plus. When it came time to get dessert, Sebastian decided to get ice cream. He unfortunately didn't know how to use it, the handle fell off the self-serve machine and he had to get yogurt instead. Right when we were about to leave, a kid flooded the urinal (I don't even know how it's possible) but since that person wouldn't own up, nobody got in trouble and we continued on our way home.
Three and a half hours later we arrived back at the school so tired that Mr. Tonic had to walk around the bus waking people up.
Thanks for reading! :)
Last Blog Post next time!
