Visiting D.C. and College Park, MD

Hi everyone. Here it is almost November--time is flying. Last weekend we went to the D.C. area, primarily to visit the National Archives in College Park, MD, which is only a few minutes outside of metro D.C., so Ben could get some research done on his master's thesis. These archives are also known as National Archives II, with "I" being the main ones on the mall in D.C. There are some pictures at the bottom of our archives experience, but we didn't want to bore you too much with the researching stuff, so instead we're just posting some of our other pictures. We spent Sunday touring around D.C., walking along the Mall, up to the Capitol, to Union Station, and to several museums (the Holocaust Museum, the National Gallery of Art, and the Smithsonian Castle). It was fun and a nice gettaway, despite the work that the research entailed!

This, below, is the Holocaust Museum. It was not a fun part of our trip--very hard and terrible to see and think about--but it was a good thing to visit, in our opinion. The only thing I couldn't believe was how many parents had brought their children to the museum--young children! Definitely not appropriate for kids under at least 12 or 14, and, even then, they need to be prepared ahead of time.

This is the National Gallery of Art (part of the Smithsonian)...

...where we saw paintings like these, by Monet and by an Italian Renassiance artist:





We briefly drove through Chinatown:



The Archives in College Park:

You can see below that the method of duplication we used for all the documents that Ben wanted to copy and bring home for reading and using in his thesis was a digital camera, which we put on a tripod. We both spent two days straight (about 15 hours) going through box after box of material about President Nixon and taking pictures of the relevant materials (all of which are "original" documents). We must've taken around 700 or so pictures!