Day 13: Philadelphia, PA to Washington, DC

Outline: Philadelphia, PA to Washington, DC (and suburbs)

I started Thursday morning off with some sightseeing of all the things that were closed by the time I showed up on Wednesday evening. Here, your obligatory shot of the Liberty Bell:

After checking out the Bell, there wasn't enough time to tour Independence Hall (tours are guided and only at particular times), so instead I went by the Federal Reserve Bank, which had a small exhibition on money and the Fed. No cameras allowed, but they did give me a sweet free bag of shredded money. On my way out I saw the following protest, which brightened my day with memories of Berkeley. Except that these protesters were lame and vanished after about ten minutes:

On my way back to the hotel, I realized that at some point I'd lost the physical key to my car (the key comes in two parts - a wireless transponder and a physical key; either half is sufficient). Even after backtracking, I couldn't find it, so presumably somewhere in Philadelphia is still a key to my car.

Leaving Philly shortly before lunchtime, I beat a quick path to DC to avoid the onset of rush hour in Baltimore or DC, and parked at a Metro station in the suburbs. With the half-day at my disposal, I took the train into the District and spent several hours admiring the works at the National Museum of American History:

(Statue of George Washington)

(Kermit the Frog, you failure. Did you really need a caption?)

After snagging a quick photo against the Washington Monument:

I walked further up to Mall, intending to visit the Vietnam War memorial. I never made it that far (ran out of time), but I did get to the WWII memorial (which surprisingly enough I didn't even know existed). It's really beautiful and rather impressed me. These photos hardly do it justice:

After that I returned to the train to get my car and head over to dinner with my relatives. Dinner was delicious and accompanied by rousing discussion about health care policy and foreign investment, but you don't care about that. You'd rather see cute-kid pics of my second cousin:

Finally, I drove back into the District, where my buddy Saqib had generously offered to put me up for the night.

Tomorrow: More Washington, DC