DC shoes

so we have seen a lot of DC lately and all of it has been on foot. friday we walked around for a little over 5 hours and today we walked around for another 10 ish hours. yesterday Austin and mostly saw monuments and stuff while Thomas geocashed.

today we saw the American history museum among other things. the top floors were normal every day museum stuff, stuff we had more or less seen in every museum we have been to so far but the bottom floor was were the cool stuff was kept! they had old steam engines, water wheels, turbines, electric generators, the DARPA grand challenge winner and the motorcycle entry! it was awesome to see the computer rendered images of the roadway and see the final product of a project that i spent some parallel time working on.

after that we saw the natural history museum. they openly admitted that they used dice when determining ages of things ... ok so they didnt but some of it was really contradictory and funny to me, circular logic and the like. on one floor they tell us about global warming and on the other they tell us that the last 30 years have been on a cooling trend. there were some other holes in their story that made me laugh too. we saw the hope diamond and one of the only red diamonds on public display.

early in the morning we got tickets to see the Washington monument from the top and so at 4pm we went up there. we were saddened to find that they had an elevator and we would not get to climb several hundred stairs. it makes it a lot less cool at the top if you just zip up there you know? we waned to see the white house but sadly we didnt know that we had to talk to a congressmen or senator 2-3 months in advance to get a white house tour.

we moved on to the air and space museum where i touched a moon rock!(it was not in my nose) we are going to have to go back to that museum because we didnt finish before it closed :(

hopefully Thomas will find some time to put up more pictures of all the neat stuff we have seen.