A tour of the Capitol!

Yea! Last week we got to tour the Capitol. We went through Senator Brownback's office and toured with one of his interns. Here we are waiting to get on the underground tram system the connects the Senate buildings to the capitol.

Once inside the paintings are breathtaking and not quite what I expected. I guess I expected large open rooms and spaces, but where we came in at was a long intricate series of arched hallways with these paintings on them. I did not know that the painter for the Capitol was the same person who painted the Vatican.

This is looking up into a painted dome with this amazing chandelier.

This is the old Senate hall. It only had 40 or so seats, so it is not in use for senate today.

Walking into the main dome. There are many paintings and statues along with amazing architecture.

A picture of the detailing in the main dome of the Capitol

The top of the dome

This bust is supposedly the most accurate picture of General George Washington.

Our Kansas Statue of Dwight Eisenhower!

This was the room where the offices of the representatives used to be.

It was interesting to learn about the acoustics of the room; when you whispered on one side of the room about 15 ft from Quincy Adams desk location you could hear it loud and clear over the site of his desk. It was crazy! I guess it was a strategic location for your desk, for eavesdropping that is!

This was a statue of a Saint from hawaii that worked with a leper colony and contracted leprosy, and that is all we know, but I bet he was important.

This spot, is in the basement of the Capitol, it is in the center of the building and where all the surrounding streets point to and branch from. You are supossed to rub your feet on it for good luck! Which is what we are doing in this picture.

It was also the location where General George Washington was going to be buried, however he insisted on being buried at Mount Vernon, which we visited have already visited.

The old Supreme Court. The current Supreme Court building is relatively new, built in the1930's , prior to that they met in random meeting rooms of the Capitol. This room was very dark and some of the justices did not like it. The Lady of Justice in this room (in the painting on the far wall in the lower picture) was looking at the Constitution rather than being blind folded as in other court rooms.


That was our visit! We also went into the House Gallery but you cannot take any pictures. It is smaller than it looks on TV.

The Supreme Court and Library of Congress..

Hey all! After visiting the Capitol we decided to cross the street to the Supreme Court. On this week the court was not in session so you can go inside the court room and listen to a lecture about the history of the building and how the court is ran.So we did.

You can't take pictures in the court room, but here is the entrance.

We went back the following week though, to listen to Court while it was in session.

It was pretty cool to sit before the supreme court. We waited in line about an 1hour and a half to make sure we got seats then the oral argument was an hour long. We didn't know anything about the case beforehand, and found it hard to follow at times, but it was a good experience. The most interesting part was watching the justices ask questions and then towards the end watch them rocking their seats looking up at the paintings on the ceiling, a couple of them looked bored themselves!

The case we heard was about an inmate from Texas who didn't get his case appealed in the proper timeframe and now they are disputing whether he should get to appeal and explaining how the TX law didn't allow for him to appeal in time or was it that he was sitting in his cell being irresponsible with his time and such. I am sure there was a lot more to it that we didn't catch! But at one point a couple of the justices were questioning if this hearing was "much ado about nothing" and wasting time. However the lawyers were certain to point out why we were here and how it affects our court systems.


A beautiful marble staircase going down to the exhibit area.

The building is very stoic in comparison to the capitol or the Library of Congress which are both very ornate and detailed.




This picture tells where we are now!

The Library of Congress



The architecture and paintings are so detailed and ornate, and everything has a

symbolic meaning and purpose. The main library room was beautiful
with a domed ceiling, no pictures allowed in that area though.

A stroll through Historic Alexandria...

Today we started by taking a little detour and ended up in Alexandria, which is just beautiful! So we scratched our plans to go downtown and enjoyed the sights, sounds, and tastes of Downtown Alexandria.

There are sooo many wonderful looking restaurants down there,

I think we will have to come back to one of their Spanish tapas restaurants.

We stopped in the cutest French bakery, with amazing croissants and cookies.

So we found this squirrel just nibbling away in a church cemetary. I couldn't resist he was soo cute. So these are my happy Halloween pictures! Eat lots of candy.

But not too much!

We are doing good here in Northern Virginia, we are looking forward to a long visit over Christmas and miss everyone. Hope all is well and let us know how you are doing!

Fall!! In Shenandoah!

We went on a hike last weekend in Shenandoah National Park.

We did a 6.5 mile hike down to a waterfall and this beautiful overlook spot.

This is the falls unfortunately you can hike there but can't get very close because they fall into a gorge with steep rocky sides.

We were rather tired after the hike, it was about 3miles down to the falls and 3 miles up, up, and up... that was the hard part. But at least there is a lot more oxygen available here in comparison to the mountains in Colorado!

A rainy day in DC!

What to do in D.C. on a rainy day? A perfect day to hop on the metro and explore, so that is what we did! And to our surprise there were some nice people getting off as we were coming in and they gave us their day pass that they were finished with. Yea! unlimited free metro rides.

Our first stop was Crystal city, an underground shopping area that turned out to be geared more for the business work week and was rather empty and did not meet our expectations!

So we hopped back on the metro and went down to the National Mall, only after we bought a large umbrella to battle the rain.

I wanted to check out the Smithsonian Castle because it looks cool!

We saw this huge Giant bird-eating tarantula, SCARY!!

This room in the castle made me feel like I was at Hogwarths from Harry Potter!

We left the castle, there really isn't much there to see, just an overview of all the smithsonian museums. We had about 30 min before all the museums closed so we browsed the entry way of the Natural History museum and this picture was from the back window,

I like the rainy days every now and again.