GFRT - Day Eight

From Yorktown, we traveled to Purcelville, VA, to stay at a bed and breakfast called Zion Springs. If you are ever in this area and need a place to stay, please consider staying here. This was such a wonderful place. They are the nicest family and their place is beautiful. I wish we could have stayed each night with them. They were very familiar with the DC area and extremely helpful to us in planning our day.

We got a little bit of late start the morning we set out for DC. The traffic was horrible and we had a hard time finding a parking space. After driving through the main area a couple of times looking for a parking garage, we finally just settled on a two hour parking space, thinking we could just call the 1-800 # and "recharge" our parking meter. WRONG! There is only a two hour limit for parking there. Period. Otherwise, you risk getting a ticket. We took our chances and managed to get out of there without being ticketed. There was construction going on everywhere and did I mention that the traffic was horrible? It took us a whole hour just to get out of DC! Needless to say, Aaron and I were both pretty stressed out by the time we left. Any ideas of staying on an extra day to tour some of the Smithsonians soon vanished. We got to see what we really wanted to see, like the Declaration and the Constitution, the Lincoln Memorial and the Arlington Cemetery. I've included a few shots here of our day at the Capitol:

These first few shots are at Arlington Cemetery, which was probably one of my favorites. We were able to witness the changing of the guards:

Does anybody see something missing in this next picture? What a disappointment that the reflection pool was under construction:

These next few were taken at the WWII memorial:

The monument was closed due to structural damage: