Vacation Day 14

Today I went to Washington DC with my sisters. I have learned something about living on the West Coast while I have family in an East Coast city. It is very hard for me to schedule a trip to any East Coast trip other then Philadelphia. I have no business and few friends in East Coast cities other then Philadelphia. Most of my friends are also on the West Coast. If I am going to spend all that time on a plane, I might as well be doing it to see my family.

I have not been to New York on Washington since I lived in on the East Coast. I have wanted to go to both of them. Washington one out because it is cheaper. Moving right before I moved drained some of my budget. There are lots of cool things you can do with Washington with out spending much money. That was the plan. I guess NYC will have to wait for another trip.

We started the day by going to the Baseball As America exhibit at the National Museum of Natural History. This has been a very baseball vacation. I think that happened because everyone knows how much I love about baseball. The exhibit was really cool. It was all about the ways baseball and American culture have influenced each other for the last hundred plus years. They had everything from the original handwritten lyrics to Take Me Out To the Ballgame to hate mail received by Hank Aaron. There were things in the exhibit that made me laugh and others that made me cry.

After that we had a little picnic in the Hirshhorn Sculpture Garden. After that we headed to the National Aquarium. Most people do not know there is an Aquarium in Washington DC and that is for good reason. It is a sad little place in the basement of the commerce building. All of the fish looked a little sad there.



After that we headed to the World War II memorial. The memorial is massive. I cannot even describe how big it seemed. After the Vietnam memorial was build people wondered if grand monuments to wars would ever be build again. While you can still see the influences of the Vietnam memorial, it had a grand feeling to it.

I have to agree with the people who criticized the location. I think it does take something away from the way the mall was set up before. I liked the fact that there was nothing in-between the Lincoln and the Washington. It is hard to see how it will look in the end because all around the Washington monument is construction right now.

The Korean War memorial is much more in the style of the Vietnam Memorial. It is much more solemn then the World War II memorial. I feel more of a connection to the Korean War memorial because it is the war my father fought in.



After walking from the World War II memorial to the Korean War memorial all I could think is that the reason we put these memorials in the nation's capital is so the leads of this nation never forget the cost of war. I am not saying that we should never go to war, but we should never kid ourselves of the cost of war. Whatever we pay that high of cost for has to be worth it.