After a small delay (I had a Thing on Tuesday, took the day off on Wednesday and had to get my pictures out of M’s laptop after he got up this morning), Yarn Miracle presents: Mr. SockPalSock Goes To Washington. There are a LOT of pictures in this one.
Here we are riding the bus to the metro station.
Once aboard the metro (subway/train/martalikething), we rode out to Arlington and then to the Pentagon (the Pentagon has lots of signs about NOT taking pictures of the building). After that, we headed into DC and visited one of Stitch DC’s three (yes, three) locations. I am a Yarn Tourist. I had to go. Besides, every single vendor at MSW was sold out of bamboo #1 dpns – I had been developing an ulcer about what would happen if I broke one and had no back up needle.
Then the tourism began in earnest. The Smithsonian(s) close(s) at 5:30 on Sundays so we decided to hit as many of those as possible. We made it to the Air and Space Museum, the Museum of Natural History, and the National Gallery before ending up in the Museum of American History. This was the highlight of Sock’s trip: he got to meet Mr. Rogers’ sweater.
He was so excited that we had to sit down and turn the heel right there in the museum.
Incidentally, the Museum of American History has a textile exhibit up right now that has several examples of hand knitting. They’ve got these mittens that have a poem worked into them and these teensy gloves are less than two inches long.
The bad part about touring DC on a Sunday is that when the museums close, so does everything else. There is no water, no food and no souvenirs. Anywhere. At all. Our last bottle of water had been consumed between the National Gallery and The Museum of American History. But did that stop us? NO! We sucked it up and walked and walked and walked to all of the monuments and other Historical Buildings of Interest. Are you ready? Here they are in order of our visit:
The Supreme Court (over my shoulder).
This was as close as we tried to get to the Capital – there was a lot of construction in the way.That is M by the lamp post.
The White House (over M’s shoulder).
We walked past the Washington Monument several times, through the new WWII Memorial (it was raining by this point), the Vietnam Memorial, the Korean Memorial and visited Lincoln with a bunch of punk middle school kids who thought it was Wicked Cool to slide on the wet marble sidewalks. I kept waiting for one of them to crack open his skull (I mean really, it’s not like the entire town isn’t made out of steep and dangerous steps or anything). The chaperones didn’t even say “Hey, Punk Kid! Knock it off – you’re going to crack open your skull or someone else’s!” M made plans to sue if his were the head to be cracked and I designed a t-shirt for my kid (who doesn’t exist yet) to wear on school trips. In bold letters it will read: If I am behaving recklessly, please call 1-888…
After Lincoln, we consulted the pop-out map KT loaned us (from now on, we will only visit cities that have pop-out maps), and plotted a course over to Jefferson. We didn’t make it. I took this picture from the bridge when we finally admitted defeat:
When we squinted, we could see him in there. At 9pm, in the rain, with no dinner and no water, we decided that was good enough.
Then it was back to the metro station (which we walked right past and had to turn around), back on the bus and back to the hotel at 10pm. It was a Full Day.