The White House and American History Museum

Jessica (my friend from the MPA program at Auburn) and I had an 11:30 tour of the White House last Saturday morning.  You can hardly bring anything into the White House - no cameras, no purses, no bags of any sort.  We had a little trouble finding where we were supposed to meet for the tour but we finally got there and found that there was a huuuge line that we had to wait through to go through security.  Thank goodness just about everyone in the line was slated for the 11:30 tour.  And it was hot.  By the time we made it through the line, we were both about to die.  We met two different secret service guys from Alabama and all the secret service members that we met along the way were all very nice and informative.  It was a self guided tour but there were secret service members stationed in each room that could answer questions.  We toured the basement and the first floor of the White House (the 2nd and 3rd floors are reserved for the president).

We saw several different presidential portraits, very ornately decorated rooms (which all seemed huge on the inside) before we ended the tour walking out the front doors of the White House.  Once we were outside looking back on the White House, it really seemed very small.  Not nearly as big as it always seems in pictures and on TV!  We happen to meet some people from Alabama walking out who had mutual friends with Jessica.  Small world!

Jessica and I stopped for a quick lunch before heading to the American History Smithsonian museum.  There are so many Smithsonian museums (and they are so huge!) that we weren't going to try to do more than one at a time.  I'm glad we picked the one we did to start with.  We saw lots of exhibits including Julia Child's kitchen, Dorothy's shoes, Kermit the frog, Fonzie's jacket, lots of first lady gowns, presidential memorabilia, and my favorite - the original 1813 American Flag.  Very successful trip.

Picture Note - while I'm in D.C., I'm sure I'm going to be taking a lot of pictures that I want to share with you guys so I think I'm going to start uploading things to Flickr so I can use slide shows here rather than posting individual pictures.  Hopefully this will work better but let me know what you think!