Day 7 - Travel to Washington and afternoon of monuments

This morning was a chance to relax and catch up before starting on a new city. Woke up late and packed my things, I stopped by one of the shopping outlets again on the way to the airport, really who can go past US$30 Tommy Hilfiger jeans.

Having overhauled how I look the last year, my wardrobe is pretty bare as it is but my idea of taking minimal clothes and buying everything over here has worked really well, a little too well, my bag only just closes and I'm early in my trip!

I now headed to the airport for the short flight up to Washington DC. There are three airports you can take into DC. The two bigger airports (handle international) are miles out of town and hard to get to being Dulles and further Baltimore-Washington International. Regan National is amazingly close to town and has a metro station. So close in fact that we flew in past the Pentagon pictured below and if I was sitting on the other side, most of the monuments, the Capitol, White House etc... So you can imagine I picked my airline based on who flew direct from MCO Orlando to DCA Regan. US Airways it was.

After heading to my hotel I went for a walk sightseeing, the White House was a short two block walk from my hotel.

There are police everywhere, security is tight. I'm either staying in the safest area of America or the most dangerous depending on how you look at it.

I'm going to risk it and say there are a number of similarities between DC and Canberra. They are cities both designed from scratch as a national capital. In DC the Capitol building (a.k.a Parliament House) is the dead centre of town. There are two different groups of people here, tourists and those who work for or are associated with the federal government. Now to me that sounds like Canberra. But that's about where the similarities end.

After the White House I walked down to the National Mall, which in fact is not a shopping mall but the outdoor space between the Capitol and the Lincoln Memorial with the Washington Monument a tall pointy stick sitting in the middle. If you've watched a presidential inorgoration thats held on the capitol steps facing down the mall.

I booked a ticket to the Washington Monument which allows you to travel to the top and get a birds eye view of town, then went down to the World War II memorial.

Further along the mall is the simple but powerful Vietnam War memorial, an angled wall listing the names of all those lost their lives.

At the end of the Mall is Lincoln and after feeling like I've just completed training for some sort of walking marathon my day is over and I head back to the hotel.