For the most part we we’re left to our own devices, the first morning we met and walked to The Mall but the rest of the time it was up to us to decide where to go.
It was yet another early start, we decided to head a few blocks away from our hotel to the Old Post Office. The building used to be Washington’s sorting office but is more of a tourist attraction, we went up to the tower to look over the city from one of the highest points. One thing we’d learn’t was that all buildings can be no higher than the Washington Monument, this means that there are no massive high rise buildings or skyscrapers, the skyline in relatively flat allowing you to see for quite a distance in all directions.
We decided that since we were in DC and weren’t that far away from the Pentagon Building that we would go see what it’s like. We knew what general direction it was in, the only problem was getting to it, we could have taken the Metro (the underground for those who can’t translate from American) but we would have missed all the cool stuff on the way. What we didn’t realise when we started the expedition was that the Pentagon Building isn’t actually in Washington DC, it’s in Virginia which is a different state, we only realised this once we crossed the state boundary, so technically we walked to another state to get to it.
The Pentagon is located near Pentagon City (who’d have guessed) it’s not very well signposted and it’s a pain to walk to, however there is a bridge with a sidewalk (which is a very rare thing) and the view from it was pretty nice. Along the way we stopped at the Thomas Jefferson Memorial for a bit, took some photos and took in the scenery, no matter where you are the scenery looks good, the Washington Memorial is pretty much the focal point of the entire city (as you will be able to see from a lot of my photos). When we finally got to the Pentagon we walked around for a bit, for obvious reasons we could only take photos up to a certain point and we couldn’t get very close to it but at least we can say that we’ve seen it in real life.
Of course no trip to Washington would be complete without a standard photo of the White House.
In the evening we decided to take another walk around the city this time under the cover of darkness, we saw the White House again which was nicely lit up and still as secure as a military silo, as one genius would have found out if he’d tried to do anything more than climb up on the railings.