Washington D.C. Part Five: "Stand There and Look Poor"

On Sunday morning, we got up and got ready for church.  Hannah and Wes' ward is currently meeting in a Baptist church until their chapel is built.  When it is finished, it will be the closest church to the Capitol and, I believe, it would have been the ward Mitt Romney would have attended had he won the election (although I don't think he would have had much of a fan club among his fellow ward members there).  As people started filtering into the chapel, I started recognizing some of the faces of the people around me.  The couple sitting in front of us attended BYU while I was there, further proving the point that the world is ten times smaller for the average Latter-Day Saint than it is for the rest of the world.

After church, Hannah and I headed to Arlington National Cemetery.  It was amazing to see the amount of people who have made the ultimate sacrifice for this country.  I am extremely grateful to all those who have served in the armed forces throughout our nation's history who have put their lives on the line so that we wouldn't have to.

Tribute to the astronauts on the space shuttle Columbia



The view from the JFK Memorial within Arlington

The changing of the guard at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier

We stopped for dinner at Hannah's grandparents' house and then headed out for another night tour of the remaining monuments.  Our first stop was the Jefferson Memorial.  I took about 100 pictures of the place but only had a few that turned out.  Apparently, the brilliance of the light shining on the white stone was just too much for my little camera.  We went inside, read all the inscriptions, and soaked in the patriotic ambience of the building.  And, of course, we couldn't leave without taking a few selfies with Thomas standing proudly in the background.

Excerpt from the Declaration of Independence

What can I say?  I was excited to be there!

We then headed across the water to the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Memorial.  While FDR is far from my favorite president, I must say that his memorial is kind of awesome.  Before the amendment passed that limited people to two terms as president, FDR was elected a whopping four times to the presidency.  Though he died a few months into his last term, he held the position of President of the United States for more than twelve years.  So I guess it makes sense that his monument would be the biggest and the most expansive.  There were lots of statues.  In other words, there were a lot of opportunities to take pictures.

I guess I haven't studied FDR enough to know why there was such a prominent statue of a dog but it was a convenient statue to take a picture with.

In the New Deal/Depression portion of the memorial.  Hannah: "Stand there and look poor."

 

Hanging out with Eleanor Roosevelt.

The man of the hour, himself.

Standing in a bread line.

We went to the Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial next.  There were A TON of people there since it's a newer monument.  I only got this one picture. 

 

After getting over my slight consternation that there was no monument to another hero of mine, James Madison (the man is known as the Father of the Constitution for goodness' sake), we headed back to the apartment after yet another successful day in Washington, D.C.!