First we went to the Iwo Jima memorial. We had never seen it up close and were amazed how big it was.
We didn't stay long. The wind was bitter cold and our fingers were freezing. We then went to a Bell Tower that was given to the U.S. from Sweden as a sign of their friendship.
Arlington Cemetery was next on our tour. We got to the Visitor’s center at 10 minutes to the hour. A sign in the center said that the changing of the guard happened every hour at the top of the hour and said that it was about a 20 minute walk.
Realizing we only had half the time needed for the walk we decided to run up hill to see the changing of the guard. We quickly realized that our bodies had become very out of shape and the air was very cold. We struggled our way up the hill and made it just in time to see the meticulous changing of the guard. We were amazed at how well they keep time with one another, clicking their feet at exactly the same time.
We leisurely walked to JFK’s grave and the eternal flame.
We got back into the warm car and drove past the Pentagon to Crystal City for lunch.
Then we went to Hain’s Point and explored The Awakening. Matt and Corey attempted several times to climb up the leg and each made it.
Cami made it on her first try – not expecting to make it even half-way up after watching the other two struggle multiple times before making it up the slick sculpture.
We drove around the neighborhoods of downtown D.C. for 20 minutes and finally found a parking spot.
We walked to the White House and saw the Christmas tree being decorated and the state trees being planted around it.
We walked to Washington memorial,
the new WWII memorial,
Lincoln Memorial,
Korean Memorial,
and Vietnam Memorial before heading back to the car.
We drove back to Corey’s to change for the temple. Jill met us there and we went to the temple for Corey’s stake temple night.
We looked around at the decorated trees on the temple grounds and the international trees in the Visitor’s Center. They were beautiful.
We went inside for a special meeting with Corey’s stake. The Washington D.C. temple does something very special for the stakes in its district. They allow the stakes to have their meeting on Saturday night in the chapel on the seventh floor of the temple. That night, they had the largest turnout ever for one of these meetings. It was really neat. The temple president said the workers would be there until everyone had a chance to do some work before they left. We went through a session and left to have a late dinner at Silver Diner.
The next morning we slept in and had a really yummy Frittata (an egg, sausage, cheese thing in a pie shell. Mmmm...). We then decided that we should do some long overdue geocaching. After two hours of Corey trying to get his GPS to download the caches, we had to go to his work so he could use the computer their. Apparently the computer at home didn’t have the right software. So finally we were on our way. We found 5 out of 6 caches.
One of them Corey found after the rest of us decided we had had enough and headed back to the car. The only one we didn’t find was a micro. We don’t really like micros. This was Jill's first experience with Geocaching. She seemed to really like finding little treasures.
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