The Washington Monument tour is free, but I decided to purchase advanced tickets from nps.gov for the first available time slot at 9 AM. Ingenious! These $3 tickets were worth every penny because I received them in the mail two weeks before the trip, while everyone else had to line up at the base of the monument and hope for a workable time slot… if any! That’s right, the early morning queue was so massive that they were going to run out of today’s tickets, even though tours last until 5 PM and run every 15 minutes. And when they run out, they run out. Best $3 spent on the trip so far.

Although we arrived at 8:45 AM, we didn’t get into the monument until 9:15. Having walked the Mall twice the day before, I was glad there was absolutely no climbing the hundreds of steps, as is the case in the Statue of Liberty. Instead, there’s a tourist-crammed elevator that rises to the top is less than two minutes. That’s significantly faster than the original steam-powered service elevator, which took 20 minutes to ascend all 500 feet.

I learned that the Washington Monument is the world’s tallest freestanding stone structure and doesn’t contain metal beams in its walls. In fact, the only metal found within this record-setting obelisk is the elevator shaft. What I already knew about the outside was that the marble at the top is a slightly different shade of white than the marble at the base since construction was halted around Civil War time and the marble used in the 1880s was from a different quarry. What I didn’t know, however, was that the inside contains unique commemorative stones donated by each state. They’re visible on the return elevator ride to the bottom.

The view is spectacular from 500-feet up and it’s so close to the 555-foot apex where those blinking anti-collision red lights are located and viewable from the inside. In addition to being able to see as far as the distant Pentagon across the Potomac in Arlington, Virginia, we got a chance to view photographs of the four sides from the turn of the century and 1930s as a comparison to the landscape today. There was a photograph from 1885 of sailboats anchored in the Tidal Basin, which had a built up harbor. Today, there’s no one on the water and the closest people are all in their cars on the 395 freeway surrounding the Jefferson Memorial.
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There’s too much to do in Washington, D.C. in two weeks, never mind a day and a half. However, that’s all of the time I have on my first visit to the nation’s capital, so my self-made itinerary calls for exploring just one museum, quickly visiting all of the major monuments and having a late dinner at a non-chain D.C. restaurant. This’ll be a good preliminary tour of the area so that I’m familiar with the sights next time I’m in town—and that next time will most certainly be at a less humid time of the year.

The Newseum is an obvious choice, as it ties into the Journalism degree I received from Penn State (and deals with my minor in history in a big way). In addition to being about one of the most fascinating topics, it’s also the newest museum having opened in 2008 and the Freedom Forum prides itself on maintaining “The world’s most interactive museum.” As interactive as this seven-story building is on the inside, the outside stays old school with over 80 newspaper front pages from around the world. It’s already amazing and I haven’t even entered the front door yet.

Eight graffiti-filled sections of the Berlin Wall are displayed on the bottom floor of the Newseum along with an East German guard tower that rises two stories. Next to it is another Cold War relic: a toppled statue of Vladimir Lenin. This lower level also contains a bunch of historical artifacts in an adjacent “G-Men & Journalists” exhibit. There’s John Dillinger’s death mask and a cache of mobster machine guns, the back section of the D.C. sniper car where bullets were fired from a modified trunk, the electric chair in which Bruno Hauptmann (the Lindbergh baby kidnapper) was executed and the Unabomber’s wooden shack along with a dismantled mail bomb.

How the media played a role in the Waco siege is brutally honest, as it details how a cameraperson unintentionally tipped off a local who happened to be a David Koresh follower, or a Davidian, about the impending FBI siege. Next to this exhibit is one for the Oklahoma City Bombing, which I’ll be visiting in person on this lengthy roadtrip.

“Our World at War: Photojournalism Beyond the Front Lines” is the third and final display on the bottom floor. While there are no artifacts associated with this exhibit, the oftentimes-gory images are the most striking in the entire museum. You feel for the people involved in these war-torn situations, but also find a new appreciation for the photojournalists, armed with only a camera, doing their jobs by covering the world’s overlooked hotspots. It makes you wonder how they can fearlessly hold a camera straight in the presence of either so much anger or so much anguish.

More awe-inspiring images hang from the Pulitzer Prize Photographs room on the second floor (confusingly labeled Level 1). Here, recognizable moments captured in time include Eddie Adams’ 1969 photograph of Gen. Nguyen Ngoc Loan executing a Viet Cong prisoner and Robert H. Jackson’s 1964 photograph of Jack Ruby shooting Lee Harvey Oswald two days after Oswald assassinated JFK. Many award-winning photos are less famous, but depict equally harrowing situations, so all of the images in this room are worth examining for a solid half hour.
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The road to Washington, D.C. traverses three state borders: Pennsylvania, Delaware and Maryland. In addition to posing at each “Welcome to…” state sign we pass, I’m also attempting to moonwalk in front of each sign and landmark from home to Los Angeles. George is doing something similar. Think of it as a combination of this guy’s photograph of himself in front of every state sign in America and Matt Harding’s dancing jig around the world.

I’ve mapped out where each state sign appears along the highways, the first being Delaware at about 1 hour and 2 minutes into the drive. To be even more precise, I noted on my itinerary that this particular sign is located right after a fork on I-95. Even with the approximate time and the knowledge of a unique road split, the sign came out of nowhere. We had to run through tall grass to backtrack a bit (you can’t go in reverse on a busy highway and turning around would take up too much time). On the plus side, photographing and videoing ourselves in front of the large blue sign only took eight minutes, two minutes less than the ten I had originally allotted for our brief stop along the shoulder of a busy/terrifying I-95.

We did the same for Maryland, where the tractor-trailers seemed bigger, but the shoulder was thankfully a bit wider. While Delaware’s enormous blue sign had the slogan “It’s good to be first,” noting it was the first state in the Union on December 7, 1787 (beating PA by a mere four days), Maryland’s yellow and white sign was smaller and simply asked you to enjoy your visit. I won’t be stopping in either of these states on my trip, but I’ve been to both before and am focusing on places I haven’t been to yet.
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I’m moving to Los Angeles from Philadelphia today, beginning an amazing, once-in-a-lifetime two week roadtrip through America. I created this blog to chronicle my travels and keep in touch with family and friends at home. Since I’ve never been to Washington, D.C. (except for a Nationals baseball game at old RFK Stadium), my friend George and I are touring the nation’s capitol the first day and a half. We’re continuing on the southern route to the west coast, filming video and taking pictures at each state sign and landmark. Our itinerary is nailed down to the minute to reduce the instances in which we always say “Ok, what now…” and waste 20 minutes finding something fun to do or somewhere to eat. This way, we’ll be able to fit in each as much of the country as possible in the next 14 days.

I always appreciate when other roadtrippers post what’s in their bag. So, here’s what I’m bringing for my adventure through America:

Things to Bring
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