DC - Part 3

Day three in DC started at the Eastern Market. This is DC's indoor/outdoor market with all sorts of vendors that sell food/arts/crafts, etc. Sounds fun, doesn't it? It came highly recommended in my guidebook. One of the vendors was supposed to have excellent pancakes, so we figured we could get breakfast there and then poke around a bit. Notice there are no pictures. There's a good reason for that. The Eastern Market was a huge disappointment. Apparently, there are only a few food vendors there throughout the week. The rest are only there on the weekends. Day three in DC was a Wednesday. My guidebook and the Eastern Market website failed to mention that if you come on a weekday you may as well skip it. Fortunately, the vendor that did the pancakes was one of the few there everyday. At least we could have a good breakfast. Oh, wait. They stop serving breakfast at 11 and it's now 11:05. Okay. Let's have a mediocre pulled pork sandwich and call it a wash.

On to the Library of Congress. There are actually three buildings that make up the Library of Congress. We went to the Thomas Jefferson building because it's the cool one. And I use the term cool to denote the building's awesomeness, not its temperature. Though, it was cool temperature-wise as well. But, I'm sure the other buildings in the Library of Congress were equally cool temperature-wise. Not so, awesome-wise. Essentially, the Thomas Jefferson building was the one to see. There's not a lot to do there unless you have some hard-core research you're working on. Since we didn't have any research to do, it didn't take long. However, this turned out to be Stella's favorite stop of the entire trip. Here's why. The Library of Congress isn't really on the list of must-do tourist activities in DC. It was, therefore, much less crowded. It had a nice, big, cool (temperature-wise) entry hall that, because of the relative lack of tourists, was very open. That meant lots of open crawling space for Stella. And after three days of hanging out in her stroller in museums and other locations, she was ready for some open crawling space. As I said, the building didn't take all that long to see, but we spent a fair amount of time there so Stella could get the wiggles out.

The entry hall in the Library of Congress. Cool, huh?

After the Library of Congress, we headed to the Capital Building. Upon entering the Library of Congress, we saw that conveniently, there was a tunnel from there to the Capital Building. We made good use of it when it was time to head over. We didn't want to do a tour of the Capital Building since that requires contacting your congress person or senator to arrange it and I am against any sort of contact with elected politicians (just kidding! We just didn't want to go to that much trouble). So, we just checked out the newly opened Capital Visitors' Center and it was much more interesting than I thought it would be. They had lots of information and displays on the history of the building and Capital Hill.

When we finished at the Capital Building, we decided to check out the Supreme Court. This was another big disappointment. The front of the building was totally covered in scaffolding, so you could hardly see it. So, we went inside to see the courtroom. Apparently, when court is not in session, you can't go in the courtroom unless you're there for a scheduled informative talk that takes place inside. We weren't there for that, so we could only go up to the door of the courtroom and peek inside. Lame.

After the Supreme Court, it was time to make our way to the National Air & Space Museum to meet up with Mr. Frisby. It was hot outside as we walked along and, yet again, Stella fell asleep.

We had a nice view of the Capital Building as we made our way down the Mall.

We took no pictures in the Air & Space museum, but we had a great time and wished we had a little longer there. After finishing at the museum, we decided to walk over to see the Jefferson Memorial and the FDR Memorial. It's quite a walk, but there are really no metro stops over there, so there aren't many other options. We got over to the Jefferson Memorial as the sun was starting to go down.

(Ashlee, please excuse the on-camera flash. The lighting situation was difficult)

By the time we finished at the Jefferson Memorial, it was dark and getting late. We decided it was too late to try to see the FDR Memorial, so it would just have to wait until we make it back there someday. And, thus concluded our last day in DC. There is just so much to do in Washington DC and, in three days, we only had time to really scrape the surface. We definitely want to go back someday and see all the things we didn't get to this time around.