Windy Saturday

Jon and I had Saturday off together so I decided we were going to use our Spy Museum tickets. Jon had to finish up something at school so we headed there first. He did his project and I played around on the Internet. Then we went to the Metro Station to go to DC. It was really windy that day and I was glad that we would be inside. When we got to Chinatown, we walked the block to The Spy Museum. At the door, we showed them the tickets and they told us President's Day Weekend was blackout to use the tickets. It said so right there on the paper. So we are going to have to go back to the Spy Museum next Sunday. So instead, we walked down to the Old Post Office. They have an elevator that takes you to the clock tower, which is the third highest point in DC. (Washington Monument is first, followed by the Basilica.) From here, on a clear day, you can see up to twelve miles. We couldn't see that far, partly because the wind stinging our eyes. It was also kind of cold because of the wind. But the views are spectacular. We were able to take the elevator right up to the ninth floor where they have a great view of the Post Office Pavilion. They have a food court down inside. On the ninth floor, they have another elevator that takes you up to the twelve floor. This is where you can look out over DC. After viewing all angles of the city, we took 36 steep steps down to the tenth floor, where they house the Bells of Congress. They were very interesting to look at and we were there by ourselves. We watched a brief video that was on a loop about the bells and then we walked the remaining stairs down to the ninth floor again. When we got back down to the ninth floor, there was a line of people waiting to take the elevator back down to the main floor so we decided to wait for the next elevator. Sadly, more people kept coming. I couldn't figure out where all these people were coming from because up in the tower we had only seen one other family and we didn't see anyone at the bells. So after about five elevator cycles, we finally got on and rode it down to the first floor.
We were starting to get hungry so we walked through the food court they had there. It was very crowded with High school/middle school kids who seemed to be on a class trip. I can't tell whether or not the are in middle school or high school anymore because I'm too far removed. Anyway, the shop owners in the food court would try and stop you in order to get you to order from their establishment. A Greek restaurant owner told us what he had on his menu. We laughed because we could see what he had because there were pictures of the food on the menu. We decided it was too crowded there and instead we walked a block down to Au Ban Pan. We decided to just have a snack so I had a cookie and Jon had a danish. We decided to head for home afterwards because I still needed to go grocery shopping. So we walked back down to the Gallery Place Metro stop and headed back to MD. There we bought groceries and had a quiet evening at home.




View from the Post Office Building







Inside the Clock Tower




The Bells of Congress




The View Inside the Post Office Building




When we came out of the Metro Station, I smelled fire. Turns out I was right. There was a fire in Laurel. They actually closed the freeway. We could see the flames from our apartment. This is our view and the fire was approximately 10 miles away.