Taxation plus representation: Our trip to Washington!

We took a family trip down to Washington D.C. over the weekend.  The original plan had been to visit the Century III ghost mall, but that’s out near Pittsburgh and it would have been a twelve-hour round trip to see something that very well could have be very boring after fifteen minutes. D.C. was closer, cheaper and had many more opportunities for interesting stuff, so that’s where we wound up going.

I haven’t been there since I was a kid.  In fact, my most recent and comprehensive knowledge of the place comes from a lot of time playing Fallout 3. I figured I could use my game knowledge to get around town.

Place has really gone to shit since Trump moved in

Spoiler, I totally could!

Our first stop after the hotel was at Arlington National Cemetery. (I wanted to get the Luck Bobblehead at Arlington House, but somebody snagged it before I did. Another of Junders Plunkett’s crimes, no doubt. )

It started raining during our visit, which I really enjoyed because it combined two of my favorite things.  The Women’s Memorial was a very nice building, but it had no visitors when we got there, which was a shame. According to this sign, they receive no government funding.  Lily saw the sign and donated five dollars to keep them going.

We saw Taft’s grave. Fun fact, he was buried in the same bathtub in which he became stuck when he was President.  We saw JFK’s grave as well. Lily asked if I thought she would ever be successful enough to merit that kind of memorial. On one hand, that’s pretty morbid. On the other hand, it’s probably my fault, seeing as how I keep dragging her to cemeteries.

We walked around a bit more, then took the metro to the Mall.

Obligatory

The lines for the Air in Space Museum were too long to justify waiting, but we went to the Hirshhorn sculpture garden.  I didn’t look as closely as Lily did, but she assured me that a sculpture of a naked baby boy riding a horse was anatomically correct. In every detail.

We went to the National Museum of the American Indian. The guy who checked my bag complimented my umbrella. It’s a Seventh Doctor umbrella, but I wasn’t trying to use it to be cutesy; it just happens to be the nicest umbrella I own, so it’s usually the one I take with me when it looks like rain.

We saw a friendly white squirrel, which we figured for an albino. Lily saw some crows harassing a different squirrel and trying to steal the piece of bread it was eating, so she ran over and waved her arms until they flew away.  If this had been the first episode of an anime series, the squirrel would have become her boon companion and would henceforth perch adorably on her shoulder.

We retired to the hotel after that. Jen and Lily had a nice time swimming, but I’d been fighting off a headache all day and I retreated to the room.

We went to the National Zoo the next day. Lily is now obsessed with Fennec foxes and Maned Wolves and we saw both of those. I was disappointed that the zoo had neither Deathclaws nor radscorpions, but at least it had naked mole rats. I tried using Moira Brown’s repellant stick on them to complete the quest, but security intervened after I got two.

Should I have gone for the Kim Possible joke instead?

We kept losing Jen. I blame Lily, who has inherited some of my bad habits of not paying attention.

Jen: I'll be at the (trumpet sounds of adult voice from Peanuts)
Lily: Uh huh.
Me: Have fun.
(Three seconds pass)
Lily: Where's mommy?
Me: Beats me.

We hit a lot of traffic on our way home, but on the whole, it was a pretty great trip.