Day 70-76. The seat of the nation.

Day 70 - 2 Sept '23 - Amish Country. A lovely slow day in the countryside today. We drove to nearby Lancaster, to see the rural lifestyle of the Amish.

It was something totally different to drive past field after field of traditionally farmed crops, watching out for horses pulling buggies on the road!

We saw a team of four horses ploughing a field, another team of three pulling a hay tiller, and then on the road we saw a team of two pulling a wagon piled high with corn, with some young men propped on top.

The whole county was criss-crossed with roads connecting all the small towns together; Dan remarked that if we didn't have GPS we'd get rather lost trying to find our way back!

We went to a town called Bird-in-Hand and paid for a horse and buggy ride, driven by a lovely Amish man called John. For 45 relaxing minutes we rode through country lanes, listening to the clip-clop of the horses hooves, and had a fascinating conversation with John, who seemed just as interested in hearing about life in New Zealand as we were of hearing about Amish life.

After our ride, we drove through some more roads, to a place that sold gluten free soft pretzels. We had eaten the hard, small, crunchy ones you can buy in the supermarket, and had seen loads of food vendors selling the hot, soft ones, but naturally, none of them were gluten free. Abi was super-excited to get her own one to try, while we ate the normal ones. They are reeeeaaaaally salty, but very yummy!

It was another lovely drive home, passing Amish families in their buggies or riding large-wheeled scooters. We had thought they had a very black and white way of living, with their plain lifestyle, religious tenets, and no power. Seeing some women using power tools to maintain their gardens, and John telling us some farms now have solar power, showed us progression hits everywhere. In John's words: "what one generation thinks is a luxury, the next says is a necessity".

And then, in a town in the middle of nowhere on the way home, a McLaren car yard, selling new and used McLarens, Lamborghinis, and the occasional Corvette and BMW!

Day 71 - 3 Sept '23 - Philadelphia to Washington D.C.. The thermostat climbed rapidly today on the drive; by the time we arrived at Arlington National Cemetery, it had hit 35°C. Luckily, the rash on Dan's legs (which had been slowly disappearing) didn't seem to flare up with the heat. We were also super excited to see the presidential helicopter flying around as we crossed from Washington to Virginia.

We deemed it somewhat crass to take pictures of us posing at a cemetery, and to be honest, I even felt uncomfortable taking the few pictures I did. There are signs everywhere reminding people that it is still a 'working' cemetery, with 30 funerals held every single weekday. It definitely felt totally different to the old burial grounds in Boston.

We were very lucky to witness the changing of the guard at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, followed by two wreath-laying ceremonies. The crystal-cut precision of the soldiers' movements was incredible to watch. Full credit to the soldiers who have to patrol on guard in full uniform in this heat; by the time this soldier finished her half-hour patrol, her face was bright red.

We were amazed to learn that there is an actual unknown soldier in the tomb; we had always assumed the Unknown Soldier tombs were just memorials. It started in Britain and France, who each laid an unknown soldier in a tomb following World War One, to represent all unknown or unidentifiable soldiers; Britain laid hers in Westminster Abbey, and France beneath the Arc de Triomphe. America (and a few other countries) followed suit, and tasked an enlisted soldier the unenviable job of picking one from four possible candidates.

(Just reading all this in the information centre had a surprisingly profound effect on me, and I could feel myself choking up when I told Dan what I had learned).

Originally the tomb at Arlington was left unguarded, but when people started pincnicking at it, the tomb gained a civilian guard for a year before becoming an armed forces guard in 1926.

We walked around a bit more of the cemetery, sweat running down our backs, faces getting redder and shinier, enduring the innumerable complaints from the kids about how hot they were.

"We KNOW how hot you are, because we are that hot too, but you have to stop going on about it, as it's going to be this hot or hotter for the next few weeks as we go further south!"

"WHAT???!!!"

We saw JFK's memorial with its eternal flame, and the Challenger memorial with bronze sculptures of the astronaut's faces, and then drove the short distance to the Iwo Jima Memorial (also known as the Marine Corps Memorial).

This memorial was built from a press photograph taken in Japan; the photo was used as an advertising strategy for the American public to buy war bonds, with the soldiers who raised the flag being reluctantly thrust into the public spotlight as heroes.

When we arrived at our accommodation, we took the kids to the pool for a bit to cool off (slightly); it was 7pm and still 33°C! Unfortunately, the pool closes at the end of tomorrow - I'm looking forward to the complaints from the kids about that when they find out...

The apartment we were in was on the 16th floor, and was the most luxurious-looking place so far. Dan and I climbed into a bed that was neither too soft nor too hard, but felt strangely lumpy, like we were lying on sand.

"The mattress is upside down!" I exclaimed. "Look! These little dimples are the rubber grippy things to keep the mattress on the base. Why on earth is the mattress upside down?"

We stood the mattress up the right way, and lifted the sheet off.

"This is why..."

Under the sheet, on the mattress protector, was a massive blood stain.

"Oh my god, that's SO GROSS!!"

Clearly the cleaners couldn't be bothered replacing the mattress protector, so just flipped it over.

So, at 11:30pm, Dan and I found ourselves pulling the mattress protector off the bed, flipping the mattress back up the right way, replacing the mattress protector upside down (we didn't want to get accused to damaging the mattress without it on), and remaking the bed.

"Oh, this is MUCH comfier!"

Day 72 - 4 Sept '23 - Washington sightseeing, day one. (Just in case you were wondering why this place is called Washington District of Columbia, it is because when they were writing the Constitution, they decided that no state should have the capitol so that that state didn't think it was more powerful than any other, hence they portioned some land off and named it a District and not a state. It's named Washington after George Washington, and the Columbia part is the female version of Columbus, which was a poetic name for the United States commonly used at the time).

Today we decided to start chipping away at the behemoth that is the Smithsonian Institute. It comprises 17 (SEVENTEEN!!) museums and a zoo. There's absolutely zero chance of us getting through them all while we are here.

We quickly changed our game plan when we got off the subway at 10am to 30°C. While it was still 'cool', we went to see the White House and other outdoor monuments, and would go to the air-conditioned museums when it got hotter. (What a crazy thing, to think of 30°C as cool!).

The movies have certainly made it look grander than it appeared, but then, they don't have to stay miles away behind fences. There was a heavy police and secret service presence, and a lot of no-go zones, and one officer even took a few steps closer when Abi pretended to squeeze through the gaps of the fence.

"I don't know why they bother with the police. We know from all the movies and TV shows and books, how ridiculously easy it is to break in!" I joked to Dan.

Our first Smithsonian after that was the Natural History Museum. Oh man, what a blessed relief the cold air was! We weren't surprised at how busy it was, with everyone getting out of the heat - plus, all their museums are FREE!

Skeletons and taxidermies of lots of different species of animal, precious gems and the Hope diamond, dinosaur skeletons and fossils and an Egyptian mummy outside of his sarcophagus, the history of humans and Lucy's miniature skeleton, meteorites...it was a seriously extensive collection. So many things to see, and so many things we didn't get to see!

We left around 3:30pm and walked outside into a wall of 36°C heat - even the wind was hot. It was like being in an oven with someone holding a hairdryer on you, which, bizarrely, was quite pleasing. For a while.

By the end of the day, the heat had taken its toll on us, and tempers had gone past short, into the range of miniscule. Dan was over it, and the kids were over being told to be quiet, so when we got back to the apartment I took them to the pool again, while Dan did some invoices and nursed his headache. Still can't believe they're closing it after tonight - lunacy!

Great news though - on our doorstep was a brand new, unopened, mattress protector! So, yes, we had to make our bed again, but we didn't mind so much.

Day 73 - 5 Sept '23 - Smithsonian, day two. Our day started at 6:15am, as the sun came streaming in through our white Venetian blinds, much like it did yesterday as well. By the time it was 8am, it was already 26°C.

At 10am both Dan and I hopped online to get tickets to the Washington Monument. It's free to go up, but they only have limited tickets, and they release the following day's tickets at 10am. All 210 tickets were gone in less than five minutes!

Dan and Alex went for a quick haircut after that, and came back with, well, let's just say there's only two weeks between a bad haircut and a good one! Dan's was MUCH shorter than he would have liked, and Alex looked like they'd forgotten to do one side of his head. Plus, the hairdresser clipped up really high on the nape of his neck, so that looks interesting...

We had booked tickets to the National Air and Space Museum for 12pm - it was free to go to, but you had to book a time slot. Unfortunately, it was undergoing some extensive renovations, with about half the museum closed off. That being said, we still managed to spend three hours there!

One of the really cool exhibits was the return module of Apollo 11, the rocket that took Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and the never-remembered Michael Collins, to the moon.

We also got to see the plane that the Wright brothers flew, a Rolls Royce aeroplane engine, Evil Knievel's motorcycle, and even the X-Wing from the original Star Wars movie!

Afterwards, we went to the National Portrait Gallery. This museum had combined with the National Gallery of American Art, and cleverly had the two change sides of the building when we climbed upstairs, so we couldn't just visit one of them.

It was pretty cool getting to see portraits of the founding fathers of the nation, that we had recently been learning about. But the biggest drawcard was the President's gallery. Here was the only place outside the White House, where you could see the portraits of all the presidents.

There was an amazing unfinished one of George Washington!

George's wife Martha commissioned a portrait after she really loved the big famous one (which was also there), and asked for it just for her own benefit. The artist got this far through, then stopped, and refused to finish it, instead keeping it as a 'template' for other works!

Some of the portraits were so incredible, you'd swear you were looking at a photograph - what a phenomenal amount of skill required.

Again, we could have spent hours wandering the halls, learning about all the people deemed important enough to have their portraits painted, but just before 5pm we called it quits.

Day 74 - 6 Sept '23 - Washington big-ticket items. Another absolute scorcher of a day, 30°C at 10am and a 36° high by 3pm.

We had booked tickets to go up the Washington Monument at 10am, and arrived there at 9:45am. We were finally let into the monument at 10:20am. That was almost half an hour of sitting on a marble bench, in the full sun, with only our hats for shade.

Everywhere we had been in Washington had security screens and bag checks, with no food or water allowed to be brought in at most of them. This one, we were luckily allowed to bring in sealed food and water, but the water was practically finished by the time we got in.

What a view from the (air-conditioned, thank god) top! We saw all the way down National Mall to the State Capitol from one side, the White House out another, the Lincoln Memorial and World War 2 memorials from a third, and the Jefferson Memorial out the fourth.

We knew the museums and galleries along the National Mall were big, but when you can see them from a birds-eye perspective, it really drove home exactly how massive they all were.

We sadly left the air-conditioned comfort, and endured a 20-minute litany of complaints from Abi about having to walk to the Lincoln Memorial.

"Yes, it's hot. Yes, we are hot too. No, we are not stopping. Yes, we are going there."

The Lincoln Memorial was undergoing renovations outside, which was a shame, but these things can't be helped. The view back down the reflection pond towards the Washington Monument, reminded us of the famous scene from Forrest Gump, when Jenny ran through it!

Inside, Lincoln sat in all his marbled glory, with his "four score" speech, as well as his Presidential speeches, engraved on the walls either side of him. Alas, he didn't come alive like he did in Night at the Museum, but then, we didn't have the tablet...

Rather than go through a 20-minute, sun-baking walk back to the subway to get to our next site, we hopped on a circulator bus to the State Capitol. The Capitol building security check had NO food or water at all, so our unfinished sandwiches (it was too hot, so we weren't hungry) went in the bin. We were all really thirsty, as our water had run out ages ago, but they had the most ice-cold drinking fountain water we had ever had when we got inside!

What an amazing place to visit - we got to see their first senate rooms, the crypt that was designed for George Washington to be interred in (which he refused, so it got turned into storage and later a gift shop!), and a statuary filled with incredible statues from all the states.

We also got to see inside the rotunda, which sits directly underneath the massive dome. It had grand paintings on the wall, the centre of the dome (with George Washington sitting between the goddesses Liberty and Victory), and a fresco painted to look like stone carvings, that ran all the way around it.

After this we went up a handy tunnel to the Library of Congress - another jaw dropping beauty of a building.

The marble carvings on the staircases, the vaulted ceilings with beautiful paintings and mosaics... We got rather sore necks looking at everything! There was also the Thomas Jefferson collection. He sold his entire collection of books (around 6700) to the Library after they had a fire, but unfortunately there was another fire about 40 years later, and sadly two thirds of his books were lost. Since then, the Library has been slowly building back his collection, but some of the books that were still there were incredible - a Bible dated 1571, and the history of the British Parliament going back to 1400!

We were also lucky enough to be there at the right time, to get into their main reading room (seen in many movies, National Treasure 2 being one of them). It had a cathedral-like feel to it; utter silence surrounded by silent grandeur.

It also had a massive dome and frescoes, paintings of women representing the subjects in the library, and statues of the men who had exceeded in those fields. What a privilege it must be to get to study in there.

Day 75 - 7 Sept '23 - Washington sightseeing again. Today was a much quieter day in respect to seeing the sights. Resigned to the fact there was no possible way to see everything, and a dwindling enthusiasm for museums from the rest of my family, I had just two things on my list.

First off was the last major presidential monument, the one for Thomas Jefferson. Much like the State Capitol and Lincoln's memorial, this one was also undergoing renovations and upgrades.

Some of his speeches were engraved on the interior walls, and it was obvious why he was chosen to draft the Declaration of Independence - his words were eloquent and meaningful, and still pertinent to this day.

We walked back towards the National Mall, past museums we didn't enter, and hopped back on the subway to go to the National Postal Museum. To be perfectly honest, I wasn't expecting much, and had to convince Dan and the kids it would be interesting, as there was a real mail plane and coach on display. Well...we were all blown away!

They had a phenomenal philatelic display; a Penny Black, the Inverted Jenny, and other ridiculously rare stamps such as a letter bearing two side-by-side stamps of George Washington franked on the second day of issue. There was a letter posted from the Titanic, a burnt-around-the-edges letter from the Hindenburg, and a letter that was sent by Pony Express but got stolen by Indians and which eventually reached its intended recipients two years later, after the Pony Express ceased to exist. There was even a letter from the Silk Road, the earliest known posted letter in existence, dated 24 November 1390.

Further on in the museum, there were trays of stamps to rifle through, and we were allowed to keep six each; this was designed to inspire people to start collecting stamps. A very friendly attendant helpfully told us about a Google app, whereby you could scan the stamps and see what they're worth. And thus disappeared another half an hour...! Some of the stamps we scanned were worth maybe one or two dollars, but some were in the couple of hundreds! Of course, they're only valuable to those who are interested, but it sure got the kids (and Dan) excited!

The thing that really amazed both Dan and I, was that all these museums and monuments were free. It can't be cheap for them to operate, or to source new exhibits, yet somewhere along the line it was deemed they must be accessible to the public at all costs.

A museum about the postal system had the hallmarks of being boring, and yet it was anything but. It made me wonder what the other ones would have been like, had we the chance to visit them.

The afternoon temperature was again 36°C, but there was an oppressive humidity now. The kids were bored of the travelling between sites, and the gusts of oven-warm air blowing around us were again taking its toll, so we went to a playground for an hour. Somehow, Alex and Abi managed to find the energy to play in the sun for this long, yet couldn't walk 500m without complaints!

Back at the apartment, after dinner and when we were chilling out watching TV, I kept getting distracted by flashes out the window. Every time I looked, I could only see planes. But then...

"Quick! Kids! Come and see this!"

A MASSIVE lightning storm! Sheet lightning and fork lightning, that both struck the ground and sheared across the sky. It was quite some distance away, as we couldn't hear anything, but it lasted about 20 minutes or so and was incredible to watch. I read online afterwards that D.C. had been in an unseasonable heatwave for five days; here's hoping the storm cleared the air.

Day 76 - 8 Sept '23 - Washington D.C. to North Carolina. We said goodbye to the Capitol of the States, and started our journey to the southern states. We stopped briefly at Petersburg, and saw where General Grant laid siege to the city holding General Lee's army for almost 10 months; one week after the end of the siege, Lee conceded defeat and surrendered.

We carried on to a place called Apex in North Carolina, to meet some friends of friends! Our friends in New Zealand who are looking after Willow (thanks again Kerstin and family), have some good friends in North Carolina, who kindly offered us a place to stay.

What a lovely family! We felt right at home, and it was wonderful to be speaking with Kiwis again. Louise had made a delicious soft taco dinner for us, and it was great to have a meal that was more elaborate and flavoursome than anything we've been able to make on the road.

Louise's younger daughter Sabine (who, it turned out, shares the same birthday as Abi but is a year older), ordered a special treat for dessert - ice cream delivered by drone! It was just crazy to watch; the drone circled the house, then lowered a bag to the ground, unhitched it's hook, and after reeling the cable back in, took off back to base. So cool!!

We stayed up until just after 11, having a couple of drinks and a lot of chats. Unfortunately Louise's husband was in France for work, and their elder daughter was at a friend's house, so we didn't get to meet them, but Sabine and her brother Hugo kept Alex and Abi entertained, which was awesome.