Washington DC

I had to get up early to catch the train from New York to Washington DC.  It was a fairly short trip about 3-4 hours.  It would probably be quicker to go by train than fly between the 2 cities.  When I got there I found that the Union Station was probably the best train station I had seen in the United States.  It had a large food court downstairs with probably 20 different places to eat and upstairs there was a selection of shops.  The ceiling had over 70 pounds of Gold on it.  The place I had booked to stay in Washington DC was a bit of a gamble, as the site had no reviews on it at all when I had booked it.  I later found out this was because they had just opened a few days before on the 1st of April.  They said it was easy to get to, but I thought after walking there with my 2 backpacks, it was a bit further than I had liked.

When I finally arrived at the place, I was wondering if I had made the right decision about the place to stay as it had a for lease sign on the front of the building.  I knocked on the door and a guy with Tattoos on his arms came down and let me in.  Over the course of the week I got to know Tom and AJ, who were the staff at the time.  It turned out that this place was probably the best place I stayed at for the social interaction. 

At the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum I got to see the Apollo 11 Command module, along with a whole heap of other interesting planes and space vehicles.  It was probably one of my favorite parts of Washington DC.

I did a lot of walking up and down the national mall, seeing all the different sites.

While I was in Washington DC, the Cherry Blossom festival was on.   Each year, the National Cherry Blossom Festival commemorates the 1912 gift of 3,000 cherry trees from Mayor Yukio Ozaki of Tokyo to the city of Washington, DC. The gift and annual celebration honor the lasting friendship between the United States and Japan and the continued close relationship between the two countries. 

As you were not meant to take photos of the Pentagon,  I had to settle for a photo from Arlington cemetery.  I found it funny in a sad kind of way that the important people got unique headstones at the top of the hill whereas the soldiers and their wives got the same headstones in fields almost indistinguishable from one another.  In the end they were all dead.