A Day in D.C.

Hey, you. Yeah you, reading this.

DON’T GO TO D.C. IN JULY.

Ok. Now that I’ve gotten my obligatory advice out of the way.

Here’s how my trip to D.C. in July went!

It all started while I was in Denver, perusing the interwebs before falling asleep at our AirBNB. I found an article on the best museums in the country, and The International Spy Museum was on the list. Immediately intrigued, I screenshotted it and sent it to my friend Sarah, saying “Take me here or we can’t be friends anymore,” which I felt was very to the point. She immediately agreed that we needed to go there, and shortly after, I found a deal on flights to D.C., and there you have it! We manifested our own destiny.

The first thing that weirded me out about D.C. was the stream of vendors lined up along the more touristy streets selling Trump 2020 merchandise. Think French Quarter in New Orleans, but instead of voodoo it’s just Donald Trump apparel.

If you stick a needle into the Cheeseburglar doll, you can make America great again.

These kinds of tables and booths were everywhere, lined up and down the streets surrounding the White House. At first I was very confused and terrified, because I’ve never seen something like that. I know folks who voted for Trump and support him, but I’m not exactly the type of person that’s hanging around his rallies, if you haven’t picked that up already, so to see this amount of Trump apparel covering the streets before it rots in our landfills for years on end was a little unnerving. But then I realized that there is probably a higher ratio of people who want to visit the White House now, versus, say, the Obama years, that might find themselves interested in a certain red hat. It was weird and I felt like I was in the Capital from the Hunger Games or some other dystopian novel that will likely inevitably come to fruition due to the incompetency of our government and the failure of society.

Anyway, on that note!

We started off our adventure with a tour of the White House.

As I mentioned earlier, the humidity and heat were terrible while we were in D.C. I would highly suggest visiting D.C. during a little more temperate month, and avoiding the summer or winter. When you start your White House tour, you’re waiting in lines outdoors as you go through several security checkpoints, and I’ll tell you it was less than ideal in the heat, and I can only imagine it wouldn’t be pleasant in the cold.

Question for you: have you ever walked down the street in humidity so thick that other pedestrians around you called it “hot soup air?” Because that is what D.C. is like in July.

As we waited in the queue outside, we huddled around the fans that were sporadically placed along our route. We didn’t have to wait terribly long, but I was definitely glistening by the time we made it indoors.

I think the weather might have been what contributed to my lack of satisfaction with the tour. The White House is beautiful, almost annoyingly so (I know that the opulence at the White House has been collected over decades, and that a portion of it is psychologically important in impressing other foreign leaders and the politics of it all, but after a while, it’s a frustrating to see another glimmering chandelier and extravagant room that probably costs a lot to maintain when there are Americans starving on the streets). But the tour was extremely short, in my opinion. We were probably in line outside longer than we actually spent on the tour. I expected to get to see more rooms than we did, so I was disappointed by how brief it was.

Anyhow. After you get through security, you walk up a short hill toward a side entrance of the White House, where they (at least during the crazy heat we experienced) had little cups of water for folks to drink and cool off, which was nice.

Our first tour stop was at the theatre, which was one of the places I really wanted to see.

It was very red and I liked it.

It was also roped off so you couldn’t actually walk in, so I leaned over the rope to take this photo, and as I did so, I saw a member of Secret Service standing to my right, watching me. It caught me off guard because you could only see him if you leaned into the room, so I went, “Oh! Hello!” and then snapped my photo before retreating. I’m sure he gets that a lot.

Next we walked through a very opulent room, that was probably one of my favorite spaces, just because of the chandeliers.

Also, within the room was the infamous portrait of George Washington that Dolly Madison saved from the White House fire.

The man, the meme, the legend. This was one of my favorite things on the tour.

I made Sarah take a mirror selfie with me in this room because I thought it would be funny.

Next on our tour was a series of three beautiful, brightly colored rooms.

Red has become one of my favorite colors, so I particularly liked this room.

It also had a little window with a sweet view of the Washington Monument.

Ok, my number one favorite room on the tour: the State Dining Room.

I’m a sucker for anything with gold accents, and this room had a lot of them. Plus it had a really beautiful bouquet of flowers that added a nice pop of purple to the room.

Aesthetics aside, it has history that appeals to the adventurer in me. A portion of the room was once Thomas Jefferson’s office, where he planned the Lewis and Clark expedition. That’s pretty damn sweet.

There was also a really fun picture of Betty Ford standing on the State Dining Room table, which I felt embodied a little of my own spirit.

I had a feeling they wouldn’t look kindly upon me re-enacting the photo.

We also found this real life portrait of JFK hearing the news that Donald Trump had been elected.

Pretty cool.

The last part of the tour was the presidential seal.

We stood in line with a bunch of other sheeple who wanted a picture in front of it, but unfortunately that cute little window with the view of the Washington Monument also provided a giant glare against the background of each photo, as the door below the seal opened up into the red room. As such, none of our photos turned out, which is fine, because I made Sarah take another mirror selfie with me.

And that was it! It took us maybe twenty minutes to walk through. Maybe.

The front entrance had a cool lantern that reminded me of The Great Gatsby, because almost everything does, and because the shades above it were vaguely green.

We also got a little glimpse at the rest of the White House through the ginormous pillars.

*Obligatory photo of myself, Sarah, and countless other tourists in front of the White House.*

After cooling down at a nearby restaurant for lunch, we headed to the American Museum of Natural History, which was my favorite museum that we visited during our trip.

I could have spent an entire day there, and would go back in a heartsick, because I have been and always will be a giant museum nerd.

It had literally everything I love, starting with the iconic elephant in the center of the museum.

It had a giant exhibit on dinosaurs, which I love.

Definitely wouldn’t want to run into a hungry one of those.

I also got to see a triceratops, which made me nostalgic for The Land Before Time, a favorite show of mine as a child.

My favorite dino as a kid was the pterodactyl, because I thought it would be sweet to be a flying dinosaur, and they even had a fossil of one!

I was ecstatic. Look at that thing! The wingspan is crazy! And the beak!

But my favorite of all favorites, the creme de la creme. THE GIANT SLOTH.

They poorly placed the fire exit in this exhibit, because it covered up my (big) little buddy’s face no matter what angle you tried to take a photo from. Fun fact: I once went to Arizona with my brother to visit my grandparents, and they took us on a cave tour. Before heading on the tour, I learned that there was a giant sloth preserved in the cave, who had fallen in through the ceiling and couldn’t escape, so he’d died. I was super excited to see the giant sloth, and chanted “Sloth, sloth, sloth!” all through the cave until we got to the sloth, much to my brother’s amusement. Unfortunately my dreams were crushed, because you could barely see the sloth, since it was getting covered by a stalagmite. But this giant sloth was fully visible!

I made Sarah take a photo of me with it.

Look at that joy!

I don’t know what it is, but there’s just something about a giant, lumbering sloth moving slowly across the planet that cracks me up.

My next favorite exhibit, as a total jewelry fiend, was the gems exhibit.

They had rooms on rooms of beautiful gems and rocks, including this gorgeous opal set in a necklace.

They also had the world’s largest cut aquamarine, which was stunning.

They had a whole room of historic pieces of jewelry that I would have loved if it wasn’t packed, elbow-to-elbow, full of annoying tourists such as myself.

>My two favorites in this particular room belonged to Josephine Bonaparte and Marie Antoinette. Josephine’s tiara, a gift from Napoleon was on display.

And a necklace that once adorned the neck of Marie Antoinette was nearby.

Drop dead gorgeous.

And – the best of all – they had the Hope Diamond.

There was a whole room dedicated to the lore and origins of the Hope Diamond, which was super interesting. I love a good necklace, and I love a good mystery.

Other key highlights that appealed to me:

A giant chunk of lapis lazuli.

A vial of actual stardust.

Mummies and a whole exhibit on Egypt, a place that has always intrigued me.

I spent almost the whole time in the museum asking Sarah why I hadn’t become an archaeologist like I had wanted to for years, and she spent 50% of her time in the museum asking me why I hadn’t in return.