Site Seeing and a Traveling Armadillo!

Since we had the time during this trip we did the site seeing that I took for granted when I lived here.

During the past months I have gotten on a Lincoln kick, my father is an admirer of Lincoln and I have taken on the admiration. So when we planned to go to Washington D.C. I wanted to see the Ford's theatre and the basement museum, so as you can imagine I was extremely bummed after a 2.5 hour car ride and walked up to this.

Luckily the Peterson House was opened and we got to take a short tour.

Here is the Lincoln Memorial. This is the first time I got to see the Memorial at night and I can say it was breath taking. On the wall it has Lincoln's second inauguration speech, one of my favorite speeches which always leaves me with chills when I read it, and more so when reading it in big print in this memorial.

We did an afternoon in Philadelphia with some friends and we ate lunch at the Reading Terminal Market, yumm

I haven't been to the Franklin Institute (which apparently is now just called The Franklin) for at least 11 years so we decided to check it out.

Here we preparing for an IMAX 3-D movie on bugs.

Brad checking out one of the many hands on exhibits.

Here we are riding a steam engine train.

An interesting part of this trip is the companion I brought a long with me, Army the armadillo. Army is an armadillo purse that was a white elephant present for the gift exchange we had at work. He has now become the traveling Armadillo and will travel with people from the office who will take pictures of him at famous landmarks, people, cities etc. I was the first to have this little guy, and I have to say two things: First, he made getting pictures at landmarks awesome, and second well we were asked if we were from Texas more than I would have liked.

So here is Army at the Washington Monument

And here he is giving it a go at the Oval Office (this of course, is just a replica of the office, pfft I'm not that important).

Independence Hall

Liberty Bell

Now, one of the highlights of the trip was a wax museum we went through. It was AWESOME!! You are allowed to touch the statues and they provided costumes and props for awesome pictures.

Here I am swooning over JFK.

Brad is meeting with Robert E. Lee to discuss the surrender treaty. (There were two choices of coats that you can choose from, blue or gray - seeing that I'm a Yankee - Brad didn't have the choice ;)

Hmmm....

Please, you would have done the same thing!

And what is this? Army what did you do to be questioned by J. Edgar Hoover?!?

Who do you think she should ditch? Bill or Army? (I definitely think Army is an improvement) :)

Possibly a last attempt to save his approval ratings?