Twelve exhausting hours on Saturday and we had seen so many incredible sights including some very well known monuments to Jefferson, FDR, Dr. King, Washington, Lincoln, WWII, the Korean War and of course the Vietnam war wall. This was followed up by seeing the front of the White House (no tours due to sequestration).
Traveling at the fastest pace possible we made it through the two building National Gallery of Art (the nation's greatest art museum and it's free!) in just under five hours and did a much shorter tour of the Air and Space Museum which was disappointing and outrageously crowded with screaming children. Topping off the day we visited the Museum of Natural History and only made it through one floor before they closed.
Sunday brought another leg shaking twelve hours of walking and another day of unbelievable sights. However Sunday was much different because it rained. Not rain like we are used to in Oregon but real, soak-you-to-the-bone rain. There was no way to avoid it and so we continued on in misery to Ford's Theatre.
Though we couldn't focus as much as we wanted to because the theatre was pumping out A/C in the middle of a rain storm we did manage to glean a little bit of the very sad but very fascinating event that happened here. Gazing up at the balcony where Lincoln's great life was ended we learned new details about that fateful night.
John Wilkes Booth killed President Lincoln because he was a Confederate and had hard feelings about the war. At the bequest of the Confederate Army he had planned to kidnap the President but went to plan B when Lee surrendered at Appomattox and the Army disavowed the plan. Booth could not accept this and convinced two other men to help by killing Vice President Johnson and the Secretary of War. Neither man succeeded (one non-fatally wounded five people at Johnson's home and the other chickened out).
Lincoln died in a boarding house room across the street nine hours later after a doctor in the audience freshly out of medical school assessed the President and said there was no hope of survival (who knows if this was accurate). In attendance with the president and his wife had been a Senator's daughter and her fiancé. Her fiancé was a General who attempted to subdue Booth and received a cut so deep it went to the bone. He was haunted by the murder all his life and years later killed his wife and then himself in his mania.
Booth was a famous actor at the theater and so no one thought anything of him coming and going several times through out the day, pacing repeatedly and acting extremely suspicious. He knew the play that Lincoln and company were there to see by heart (Lincoln had seen him perform it before and complimented him) and timed his fatal shot to come right when the lead actor delivered the "funniest" line of the play (we might not think it was so funny nowadays) thus muffling some of the gun shot sound with the crowd's laughter.
Eventually the rain broke and by mid-afternoon we had finally dried off. We spent our new found dryness by visiting the Capitol building and the Library of Congress (no tours on Sundays). Afterwards we toured several more museums; the Museum of Portraits/American Art Museum, Freer Art Gallery, finished the Museum of Natural History and then, saving the best for last, the Museum of History.
Here we were delighted to see many very important artifacts like Bob Dylan's leather jacket, Lincoln's hat, Washington's sword and jacket and Dorothy's red heels from the Wizard of Oz. The only complaint was that there wasn't enough time to see everything we wanted, so take if from us; start with the Museum of History.
Isaiah meets his idol
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