Today’s day trip was to Arlington National Cemetery. Since it’s one of the few places not affected by the government shut down you can guess it was pretty busy. Yup, school trips, tour groups and just in general lots of people.
We left the visitor’s center and headed up to Kennedy’s gravesite.
The eternal flame at Kennedy’s burial. No other pictures from here because it is under construction for a new eternal flame.
We heard someone mention that they still had time to make it the tomb of the unknown soldier for the changing of the gaurd. So Dwayne and I headed up there to watch.
tomb of the unknown
Changing of the guard
After the changing of the guard we walked around the Amplitheater and looked inside. The entire thing is made out of Marble.
On our way over to look at the Space Shuttle memorials we noticed a military band coming and realized it was a funeral procession.
military band
funeral procession
Next up was the space shuttle memorials.
Space shuttle Challenger
Space shuttle Columbia
We wondered our way up to Arlington House which sits up on the top of the hill in the cemetery and can be seen from just about everywhere. It has a great view out over the cemetery and down to the back side of Lincoln Memorial.
Arlington House
The Pan Am memorial was on our way to Arlington House.
Plaque from Pan Am memorial cairn
stones for cairn were mined from a quarry near Lockerbie Scotland and donated as a gift for the people who died on the flight.
We were looking at some of the headstones as we walked through and I saw this one that I thought was really interesting. There are some really old headstones in here.
On our way back down a path behind Kennedy’s grave site we came across a grave that they think is the original person buried in the cemetery.
We also came across the grave site for Abraham Lincolns son Robert Todd Lincoln
There is a section over by President William Taft’s grave site that is nothing but 2-5 star generals. We realized too late that I didn’t take a picture of all the headstones showing the 2,3,4 and 5 starts. I did take a picture of one that Dwayne recognized though.
President William Taft
When you walk out you walk past the memorial for Women in Military Service for America.
It’s lunch time and we decided to ride the Metro back into town and get off at the Federal Triangle stop. We went into the food court only to see first hand some of the affects of the shutdown. There was no one in the food court and they were all just waiting to go home for the day.
After that we decided to take a wall down the National mall and just see what was going on.
No surprise there……..nothing. In fact the street is closed off on both sides to car traffic. The only traffic allowed right now is bike and foot traffic.
In fact even the popcorn guy isn’t working.
Smithsonian castle. If the Mall was open you would never be able to get this picture because there would be too many people and cars going buy.
That was our day today. Still no plans for tomorrow but we’ll come up with something. We are still hoping the get their heads out of their butts and we can still see some of the things we came to see by Thursday.
We’ll see……..