Three friends in a long tour of the U.S.A... The famous capital: tour of Washington D.C.
Arriving in Washington from Pennsylvania through Maryland.
The District of Columbia Washington, while Washington is virtually not only the District of Columbia, in fact, the Capital of the United States of America has grown to such an extent as to occupy the nearby Virginia where there are important national institutions like the Pentagon and the cemetery Military Arlington. To separate the District of Columbia from Virginia is the Potomac River across from large modern 5-lane highways as almost everywhere in the U.S. are free. The monumental Capital grows naturally in the original nucleus, one created out of nothing on the advice of the first President George Washington in the aftermath of anti-British revolution that allowed the birth of the United States. I came here with three companions and a car rented in New York as a stage of a long trip to the USA We arrived early afternoon refreshment in a "Donut" on the outskirts of the city then tried in vain to reach Mount Vernon in Virginia, the traffic is easy but our navigation system crashes so we give up and go back into town. We arrived a day early on hotel reservation, made in Italy so we should find another place but in the meantime we are in the center, park and begin the tour. Reaching the center we have seen from the street is the imposing bulk of the Pentagon, we touched Its enclosure of the cemetery in Arlington and we went near the Jefferson Memorial. Walk toward the Capitol and go shoot some photos in front of the grand staircase turning their backs to the huge dome. Before us opens a wide and long boulevard divided in two by a field where you overlook the most important buildings of the capital. We walk up the avenue to the Washington Monument, the tallest obelisk visible from many parts of the city, passing in front of the museums that we intend to visit tomorrow. I peered through the windows anyway diel and Air Space Museum that looks really promising. From the Washington Monument look at the Lincoln Memorial, a kiosk with neoclassical columns but we are too tired to get there, we prefer to divert to the White House to do some photos in front of the most famous home of the world. While we try to get there we see a long column of cars paraded blue with siren wailing, probably the President who is leaving the house. Let your photograph taken on the sides of the main building, one where there is the oval room and the entrance. Observe as the place where he lives the most powerful man in the world is actually a neoclassical house not so big as there are many, much smaller and less ambitious than the other mansions. Among other things, you can rest peacefully in front of the entrance gate which apparently does not appear ipersorvegliato. We return by taxi to our car looking like Washington is a town sober, orderly, clean, systematic, but this is understandable since it was created out of nothing at the table on land ceded by Maryland and Virginia. Unfortunately this city bureaucracy and management is not a city alive, at least from what we have seen apparently in an eternal slumber, in strong contrast to many hubs in the United States like New York or Las Vegas. I realize that there is only one country but there are many but is unavoidable in a nation as large as a continent where the distances are enormous, where the centers are sometimes separated by wide uninhabited areas regardless of whether it is an arid desert, of a prairie or a Florida campaign. The only common denominator of this great country is the sense that every patriotic American guards inside the outer exposing the Stars and Stripes on his house and that patriotism Washington identifies him well with its monuments.
Shooting our car recrossed one of the many bridges over the Potomac and form part of Virginia near Alexandria, where we have dinner first at a McDonald then sleep in a motel.
We return in the District of Columbia only in the late morning, we have booked the hotel really nice and central Italy. After eating at a fast-food back on the long path monument to see the two museums in our opinion the most interesting. The famous Air and Space Museum, the largest of its kind in the world, exposes space shuttles, stations orbiting satellites, lunar modules, astronaut suits and helmets. Are findings that are part of the history of astronautics as the spacecraft 11 or the spacecraft that carried the first man in space. The other part of the museum is dedicated to aviation, from Icarus to Leonardo's drawings, from flight testing the brothers Wrayt to modern planes. During the visit, you can climb on some means is air space and observe historical aircraft such as the Second World War and the "Spirit of Limberg St.Luis with which it first crossed the Atlantic.
Once out of here, across the wide avenue, we reach the Museum of Natural History to visit the area devoted to dinosaurs. Here you can see the skeletons of many prehistoric animals both terrestrial and marine aircraft, often gigantic bony structures that give a sense of how they should be enorni these beasts. In some showcases fossils of shells, insects and footprints found in various parts of the United States but through a glass you can see an archaeologist at work intent on cleaning up the bones of dinosaurs. Do not visit the rest of the museum before leaving even if we pay attention to some petrified tree trunks and one of the famous statues on Easter Island. We would also go to the Museum of American History closed for refurbishment but it is so because we have accumulated a lot of fatigue in these days we go by taxi to the hotel for rest. In the evening we go out for dinner not far from our home we eat a pizza and came in for sleep.
We wake up after a few hours because of early morning we leave Washinton and the District of Columbia to Virginia, Dulles Airport take the airplane American Aerlines toward Los Angeles.