Washington DC: Day 7.
Our last full day in DC was an exciting one!! We started off with a tour of the White House! We only got to see (most of) the bottom floor, but man is it pretty! It's just crazy how there are pieces of every president (not literally) that has lived there scattered throughout the grounds. For example, Ford wanted a pool, they put in a pool. Truman wanted a bowling alley, they put in a bowling alley. There is a china cabinet near the entrance that holds pieces of china that were designed specifically for each president, and each one has the presidential seal on it (the china will be important later, so remember this). We got to view a few of the sitting rooms, a dining room, and learn about what each of the rooms are used for. And we got an awesome view of the grounds from inside the White House, which was really cool. I can't imagine living there! We didn't get to see the living quarters, which was too bad, but makes sense. I wondered how much of what we saw gets used on a daily basis, and then we overheard a security guy saying that the tours end at one, and the ropes come down so the rooms can be used again, so that answered my question! It was a pretty quick tour, only about 45 minutes, but we walked around the outside of the grounds afterward and got some good pictures!
Side note: At one point during the tour, a lady asked a guard if the room we were standing in is where the president holds his press conferences, to which the guard replied yes. So the lady's husband said "Good call, Pauline," and then kept repeating it multiple times. I always say good call, Paul to Brandon, so it was hurting my brain and making me laugh all at the same time that this guy was saying good call, Paul...ine. It was funny. Anyway, moving on.
We split up for lunch, then met at the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum after. We were all pretty museumed out by this point, so we mostly walked around and just looked at everything; there wasn't much reading/learning involved. If nothing else, the guys enjoyed looking at all the airplanes and spacecraft stuff, so it was worth it.
We called it a day pretty early and went to a nice sit down dinner at a Mexican restaurant. It felt good to just sit and not have to worry about where we had to rush off to next. After dinner, we went back to the house and watched White House Down. Like the night we watched National Treasure, it was fun because we had just been there that morning! At one point in the movie, the bad guys shoot the china cabinet (remember the one I told you not to forget?) and we all said "not the china!" Even though the house gets wrecked in the movie, it was still fun to watch it and point out all the things we had seen that day.
