Wanderlust of Dill

“Change will not come if we wait for some other person or some other time. We are the ones we’ve been waiting for. We are the change that we seek.” – Barack Obama

After a rough night being stuck on the side of the highway outside Boston in a snow storm we made it to the capital of the United States. All the parking in the city is restricted to only a couple of hours so we parked out of town and caught the first-class metro into the city centre. The amazing thing about Washington is not only the amazing monuments, but all the world-class museums are free! Free! And they are all really great! It is even free to go up to the top of the Washington Monument. The Natural History Museum, National Archives and the Air and Space museum was all I had time to explore completely. There are also some free tours in the Air and Space museum which was really good. It was great to be able to do so many indoor activities as it was soooo cold outside! It explained why we woke up covered in several inches of snow the following day. Of-course one cannot go to Washington without seeing the White House, from a distance, from behind a fence. It is surprisingly small and as it was covered in snow it was not as impressive as I had imagined, but cool to have seen nonetheless. I was more impressed by the Lincoln Memorial in all its grandeur. It felt pretty special to stand on the spot where Martin Luther King Junior made his famous speech overlooking the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, imagining what it would have been like on that August day in 1963.

Washington D.C. tips:

– We managed to find probably THE ONLY free and non-restricted parking in the whole city up the hill from Cleveland Park Metro Station on Ordway St NW (look carefully on the left hand side for an unmarked area). Hopefully they don’t catch onto this and it stays around for a while

– Although the museums are free, the butterfly exhibit in the Natural History Museum is paid entry, but free on Tuesdays!