For our first voyage into Washington D.C. we decided to go on a tour. The bus picked us up at the campground at 6:45 am. There is a Nuclear Arms Summit in town, so some of the streets are blocked, traffic is crazy, and security is high.

Our first stop was at the Capital building. It took us about 15 minutes just to walk around it to the back where the visitors entrance was...all uphill. We had to go through security, no food, no drinks (not even water), no spray containers (they made me throw away my sunscreen), no nail files, etc. We went through a metal detector and they thoroughly searched my purse.

There were so many people waiting to tour the capital, we had about 50 in our group. They gave us headphones so that we could hear our tour guide, but mine didn't work. But the building was beautiful.

Looking up into the dome of the Capital.

After this tour, our driver took us to the WWII memorial. Four people in our bus group got lost and the driver had to leave them. He dropped us off at the Smithsonian and went back to find them. There was a lot of joking with them after that.

This is as close as we could get to the White House. We wrote our Senator and had a security check to try and get tickets to go into the White House. We were told that White House tickets are very rare since 911, and with the Nuclear Summit going on....no chance.

This is the Ford Theater where Abraham Lincoln was shot. After he was shot, he was carried across the street to a boarding house where he received medical treatment. He died at the boarding house 9 hours later.

Sorry for the poor quality of this picture. There were row houses all along our route. Blocks and blocks of row houses. These were actually some of the larger homes.

Tomorrow we will go into the city on our own, catching a bus at 7:30 then getting on the subway. Hopefully we won't get lost.