We had an exhausting day today. After grabbing some food, we took the Metro down to the Mall. Our first stop was the Museum of Natural History. But we were very disappointed to find out that the Museum of American History was closed. I had been telling Denise about it--and had gotten her plenty excited about it--since it's the museum that has a whole bunch of pop culture artifacts. But fortunately the site told us that some select exhibits were currently on display at the Air and Space Museum, which we were planning on going to anyway. However, our hopes were once again crushed when we found out that, in preparation for the Museum of American History's reopening this fall, they had taken back all of their exhibits so we were completely out of luck. Oh well, we'll have to come back.
Afterwards, we walked to the U.S. Holocaust Museum, we walked past the Washington Monument to the new World War II Memorial, alongside the reflecting pool to the Lincoln Memorial and then past the White House (we also walked past the Treasury building and Ford's Theatre).
After having a free drink and appetizer (thanks to horrible service at the hotel sports bar), we embarked on what proved to be the longest, most annoying 120-mile drive before we FINALLY arrived at our hotel in Philadelphia at close to 1am. We got stuck in what had to have been the worst traffic jam either of us has ever been in thanks to some construction in Maryland. And that includes the traffic we had to deal with back home when the 35W bridge fell!! It had to have taken close to two hours to finally get through! Not only that, we hit another one (although not as bad) in Delaware. Does the northeast not know how to do road construction without completely shutting down interstates?! Between that and $4-5 tolls, driving up here is proving to be a pain in the a**!!
Day 9 Route