October 28, 2010

We started the day with some schoolwork before we headed downtown for lunch. We had been invited to lunch by April Pedersen, who is on the board of CIVIC. Shelly from CIVIC also joined us. We met up at a great vegan café called Java Green. The food was excellent!

Speaking of CIVIC Here we are with the CIVIC team during our visit to their offices the other day.

The last point on our must do list was the Lincoln Memorial. The weather was fantastic so we decided to walk down to the mall and the memorial.

This part of mall has many trees and a lake and was a great peaceful place to rest a bit and have an ice cream.

Slanted trees are about as comfortable as a reclining seat on a low-cost flight.

It’s a mighty memorial and we had another good opportunity to use Wikipedia to teach ourselves and the kids some history.

Lincoln, as most of you know, was the president who ruled during the civil war and was instrumental in the abolishment of slavery in the US. The memorial is also the place where Martin Luther King Jr held his famous “I have a dream” speech.

We strolled over to the Vietnam War Veterans Memorial Wall. It’s impressive to see all the names at once. It somehow gives you at least a small grasp of the tragedy of war. As I told the boys, all those named here were loved by someone. Some were fathers, most had parents waiting for them, many had siblings and/or a partner who lost someone very dear.

We then walked over the Arlington Memorial Bridge into Virginia to have a look at the Arlington National Cemetery. Planes were coming in towards the national airport straight over us as we walked over the bridge.

The cemetery is huge. There are over 300 000 graves and about 6900 funerals are held there every year. We walked over to the entrance area

and used the opportunity to have the whole family go to the restroom. When you travel with kids you always have to make sure to make regular restroom breaks. That is the golden rule of successful kid activity excursions, as any parent will know. If you wait until the kids have to go it will be too late and you will probably find yourself in some embarrassing and/or extremely unpractical setting.

After we had managed to herd all the cats, eh kids, in and out of the restrooms it was finally time to enter the cemetery. There was an elevator up to the entrance one level up, but it was not working. Strange. We went outside, only to find all the openings you can see on the photo above covered by very solid gates. It was 04:59pm and the cemetery was closing!

Excellent planning and organization once again! We walked defeated towards the nearby metro station. On our way we found that at some places we could get very close to the cemetery, So close that we could get the kids attention, talk about the place, and take some pictures through the fence.

On our way back we decided to spoil ourselves a bit and go back to the French restaurant we visited on our first night here. We were immediately recognized and given a very warm welcome. They even apologized for the long waiting time last time we were there. Once again we had an excellent French meal, this time served very rapidly. If you are in DC and like genuine French cuisine, this is the place to go:

Hélène has been packing around me while I have been writing this. We leave tomorrow morning.

Time to go to bed.

Eirik

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