Day 3 Commentary

It was so late last night when we came in that I couldn't blog anything. Alan posted what was there, so I'm going to tell you what we did. First we went to Larry Craig's office. The senators get huge offices with huge staff, and the representatives don't. We only stayed there long enough to get pictures with him and then some of his staff took us on a tour of the capitol. Very cool, except the guy who took us acted like he didn't care if we were there or not. I couln't hear about 75% of what he said. The rotunda was beautiful and there is one statue of a famous person from every state. We went and stood by Pres. Brigham Young's statue for a picture, because we recognized him not the man from Idaho. And then lots of our group did the same thing. We're mostly Mormons and you just can't take the mormon out of us. We get excited when we see a prophet, even if he's been dead for a long time. We saw the old rooms of the senate and supreme court. Very small, but really neat. Then we went upstairs to the gallery? and watched a democrat senator ramble on and on showing tons of charts about how it would be OK to raise our taxes just over 2% over the totally ridiculous and astronomical figure of last time when the republicans were in charge. We considered standing up and heckling the guy, but thought that wouldn't go over very well for Idaho.
Next we went to lunch at Union station, which is very neat. It is the station for Amtrack and is really beautiful and large. You can take a train here and go to Grand Central station in 3 hours only $60. Then we went to talk to our representative Mike Simpson. He is a lot of hot air. I can't believe we keep voting him in. Reminds me of McCain. Then we went to see the Library of Congress which was so ornate and so decorated with paintings on the walls and ceilings and statuary everywhere. The floors are tile and there are mosaics everywhere too. I like this building a lot. They don't let you in the part where the books are. I think you have to have a GOLD library card to even get in that door. Then we went next door to the supreme court building and saw statues or busts of all the supreme court justices. Not so impressive inside, but very impressive on the outside. The steps and the pillars are beautiful and very justice-y. You get no impression of mercy. Then we went and talked with Senator Mike Crapo. Crapo is our best legislator, now that Craig is on his way out. Then we walked down the side of the capitol building and around the front. We wook picures everywhere and also saw Ulysses Grant memorial which is very cool. Old soldier on beautiful horse.
At 6:30 we went on a tour of DC at night and saw all the monuments lit up. Some that we hadn't seen and others we had. We went to the Jefferson memorial, and architecturally speaking, (which I'm not) it was the most beautiful. The Korean conflict memorial was absolutely stunning. Very different with 19 creeping soldiers coming through a rice paddy. And at night it was eerily real. The faces on these 19 statues showed all sorts of emotion; fatigue, fear, sadness. We saw the Marine corps monument which is the raising of the flag at Iwo Jima. It's huge and Zack and I got into an argument there so I only remember it was huge. I remember the argument better. We saw the white house last from the backside. It doesn't look as large as from the front. We took the picture of us to show you how we could be a first family. Of course Alan would have start watching the news a little more, quit watching so much weather, I would have to lose weight so I would look better in some cool first lady pant suits, and Zack would have to learn how to smile more so he could make a good impression on the people of the country. He would make a good "first son," don't you think?