The Trip: 10/25/12 Washington D.C.

Hi everyone,
Well, we have had a busy week. It took us two days to travel up the Potomac River to D.C., where we spent five days before departing back down the Potomac River on another two days of traveling. We finished the trip back down the Potomac several days ago, but I was not able to write a post then because of our high data usage for the month (We have a wireless hotspot from Verizon with ten gigabytes of data per month, but we use almost all of it doing our schoolwork online). In any case, we had a few fun days in D.C. exploring all of the monuments and sights. When we pulled into the harbor, I was delighted to see several batteries of NASAMS(Norwegian Advanced Surface to Air Missile Systems) scanning the skies for possible attacks. Knowing that Washington D.C. was not going to be carpet-bombed with nuclear missiles during our stay was very reassuring. We anchored off the Capital Yacht Club marina, and stayed as guests of the marina. Interestingly, we anchored within sight of the boat that took my entire eighth grade class on a river cruise during our end-of-middle-school trip to D.C. last year. Another interesting thing about where we stayed was that it was a major helicopter patrol route. Every fifteen minutes or so, a different helicopter would fly over. They would come by low and fast, perhaps a hundred and fifty feet above the water, and by the time you looked out the window they would already have passed over you and be heading away. During our stay we saw one black hawk helicopter and also the Presidential Helicopters twice. The Presidential Helicopters(Marine One) always fly in pairs so that one can act as a decoy for the other. In any case, that was as close as we came to seeing Obama.
When we arrived in D.C. it was around noon. After lunch and a check-in at the marina, it was one or two in the afternoon. Julia and I went for a kayak that afternoon, exploring up the river almost to the reflecting pool in front of the Jefferson Memorial. When we got back we had a nice happy hour, even though it was clouded over by then and getting dark. That night we took a trip to a local outdoor seafood market to get fresh food for dinner. The market was only a couple hundred yards away from the marina, and was filled with vendors selling fish that were caught only hours before. It was a massive affair, with hundreds of feet of iced display counters showcasing all manor of seafood. Clams, crabs, oysters, salmon fillets, shark fillets, whole tuna, just to name a few. We tried king crab legs for the first time, and we also had a swordfish steak on the grill.
The next morning we headed out early for a big day of sightseeing. We went through the Roosevelt Memorial, the Jefferson Memorial, the Martin Luther King Junior Memorial, the Vietnam War Memorial, the Lincoln Memorial, and stood in front of the White House. Afterward, we had a quick lunch and continued onward, touring the National Air and Space Museum on the Mall. Needless to say, it was a long day and afterward we were exhausted. We returned to the seafood market and got a couple dozen clams and some salmon for dinner. I think we were all in bed by ten o'clock, we were so tired.
The next morning we got up and walked to the Holocaust museum. We did not have much time there, however, because we had made an appointment to visit the Capitol building at one o'clock. If you have never been to the Capitol building, I highly recommend it. The building itself is magnificent, and the tour guides point out all sorts of interesting historical information.While history is not my favorite subject, I enjoyed the tour. After we toured the Capitol we did not have enough time to see anything else, so we asked Siri for a nearby restaurant that served ice cream. Twenty minutes and two miles through the hot city streets later, we finally found our ice cream store underground in a subway terminal. The ice cream was a serve-yourself style, like the Nuvita in Branford. Afterward we returned to the boat, when my mother's friend Karyn came to visit. She lives nearby, and we enjoyed another dinner of grilled scallops and shrimp with her.
The next day we had a nice leisurely start to our morning and later went to the Natural History Museum. In front of the Museum there was a kiosk where a man was selling Segway tours of Washington. While we did not go on the tour, we instead chose to do an intro to Segway riding. All four of us tried riding the Segway; Only Dad had previous experience on a Segway but they are very easy to learn and we ended up taking lots of pictures and having a lot of fun. Afterward we toured the Natural History Museum, and walked a few blocks to meet a friend of ours. We got back fairly late in the afternoon, which is not a good time to be walking around in that area of D.C., but we got home safely and had another great dinner on the boat.
The next morning we enjoyed a rather slow morning. Julia and I went to the Capital Yacht Club to use their wi-fi to get school work done, and afterwards we went to the National Portrait Gallery. After a mercifully short and, in my opinion, rather dull, tour through a museum filled with portraits of different presidents, we crossed the street to the Spy Museum. It showcased the history of spies and their effect on historical events, which was more interesting. As we left the museum, it was starting to rain, so we took a subway ride to a local Safeway grocery store for more food. By the time we had finished shopping, it was pouring outside, so we had to get a taxi to the marina. The taxi had a broken blower, and we had to drive with the windows down so the windshield did not fog up! It was still raining heavily as we got to the marina, and we were invited to stay for the club's 120th Founding day celebration. We stayed, and met a lot of wonderful people. Julia and I were the only two children there, but we were still accepted immediately into the group and we ended up having a lot of fun. The highlight of the evening was a speech by James P. Muldoon, who is a widely renowned sailor. We went home feeling like we had just made a lot of new friends. Unfortunately, we had to leave the next day, but we had a great visit to D.C. and we had a lot of great experiences.