Touring the Capitol

You need to request a visit to the U.S. Capitol Building and White House several weeks in advance.

When you do, you provide a list of days that you're available.  This we did, happily, listing as many options as we could leading up to our departure date to try to ensure that we'd get a chance to go.  We didn't hear back for a long time, but in our last week in Maryland, when we were busy pretending we didn't need to pack, we learned that the White House was expecting us on Saturday morning, and the Senate was planning to see us on Friday.  We quickly realized that there was no way we'd be out of our house by Monday morning.

Thankfully our landlords were happy to extend our stay.

And so, once again, we postponed the perils of packing and headed to D.C.  Twice!

Friday - Capitol Building Tour

We got caught in quite a rainstorm! 

There are statues all throughout the Capitol Building.  Each state provides a statue representing a part of their history.  Linnea has always been fascinated by Helen Keller's story, and was glad that Alabama chose her.  There's a list of all the statues here.  It's pretty neat who was chosen - lots of stories.

For the tour, we were put into a group of about forty people.  Our tour guide handed out headphones that allowed us to hear his voice clearly - and not the voices of the other tour guides.  It was a efficient system and our tour guide provided lots of stories and fascinating tidbits of information.

Here are a few photos.  Quite the grand place!

 There is a lot of great information about the Capitol building here. The video is a little cheesy, but you can see a lot of what we saw! 

After our tour, we walked over to the Library of Congress building.  What beauty!  I loved it!

Here's the actual library.  Looking down from a balcony....

...and looking up....

This tile mosaic is at least two storeys tall.

 Here's the view at my eye-level:

By this time, our legs were just aching to sit down and our eyes were starting to take for granted grand and beautiful things.  We headed back to our cottage and gratefully crawled into our beds, with alarm clocks set for 5:30 am so we could get to the White House on time the next morning.