Traveling man *updated with pic*

So while Natalie is back home studying her little heart out, I am spending her entire finals week in Washington DC for work. I get to travel quite a bit for my job, but I don't often get much time to see the sights at these cities I visit. There have been a few exceptions, like when I took Natalie to Boston and Baltimore, but those have unfortunately those have been the exceptions rather than the rule. What usually happens is I spend 2 days in a city, I fly out of Phoenix early early the first morning, spend the rest of the day slumming around the hotel, spend all the next day working, and go straight to the airport to fly home. Not too exciting, let me tell 'ya.

This time though, I have almost 4 full days in the DC area, and I only have to work for about 6 hours total in those 4 days. I'm really excited because I've never been to DC long enough to walk around and see all the monuments and museums. I even get to go to the DC temple! I went down to the National Mall this afternoon and saw the Lincoln Memorial and Vietnam Veteran's memorial, I had to sit through almost 2 hours of downtown rush hour traffic to get there, but it was totally worth it!

On a side note, we bought this totally awesome new digital camera... which I didn't bring on this trip. I didn't even bring out older, cheaper-but-still-better-than-my-cell-phone camera, so all I have are a couple of blurry pics which I'll post when I get home.


The Lincoln Memorial was a lot different than I thought it would be. It was really simple, I was expecting a full Smithsonian style exhibit about his life and especially death. All it was was a long marble staircase up to the seated statue of Lincoln. On the left wall was the Gettysberg address, on the left wall was a speech I didn't recognize, it looked like an inaugural address from his reelection, and that was pretty much it. The Vietnam memorial was really cool, but I really liked the Korean War memorial. I started tagging along behind a tour group listening to the tour guide, she was telling all kinds of stories. The Korean memorial is really similar to the Vietnam, but instead of carving all the names of casualties in black granite, they put portraits and pictures of the fallen soldiers.

It almost doesn't seem fair that I'm touring the nation's capital while Natalie is at home studying for her ridiculous number of finals, but I think she'll actually get more done if I'm 3000 miles away, and so far it seems to be working. Four finals down and only two more to go! I'm going to get home just in time for the celebration, as of Friday, Natalie is officially a second year PA student!Standing on the steps of the Lincoln Monument looking across the reflecting pool at the Washington monument (I believe the Jefferson monument is the domed building behind the Washington)

Not too bad for a cell phone camera!