No — the earplugs didn’t work. But still, I had a wonderful trip to Washington DC.

As our plane descended towards Reagan National Airport last Saturday it was all I could do to keep from shouting out, much like a small child, “Look! There’s the Washington Monument! Look, the Capitol!!” It was just so cool to be looking upon these buildings that I’ve seen for many years in textbooks and on the news. That evening, stuck in an amazing amount of traffic as we wove our way from airport to hotel, I did my part as a true tourist and leaned out the car window to take a picture of the statuesque white Capitol dome. Throughout our five day stay in DC I never ceased to be awed by the history so easily seen from almost any point in the city.

The most incredible museum visited was the National Gallery of Art. To any student of Art History, this place is a gold mine. Stunning works by Renoir, Monet, Manet, Degas, Toulouse-Lautrec, Rodin and Cassat filled the halls — my mom and I wandered and gazed wide-eyed, contemplating how we could actually be standing in front of such pieces. We ran out time and did not tour all the galleries, but managed to spend a good amount of time in the gift shops on the lower levels.

The most incredible monument visited was the Lincoln Memorial. One evening my dad and I began our walking tour of the city’s many monuments. We walked for two hours straight — first to the White House (so very impressive to see in person… I was dying to meet the President, but only met his front yard instead), then to the Vietnam War Memorials, the Lincoln Memorial, the Korean War Memorial and the Washington Monument. After climbing the massive steps to the Lincoln Memorial we stood inside the cavernous monument and read the Gettysburg Address. After reading it I praised the Lord for giving us such a godly president at such a tumultuous time in our nation’s history. The words of Abraham Lincoln carved on the walls, combined with the beautiful sunset and throngs of quiet tourists taking in the special moment, gave me goosebumps and secured this memorial as the most special in my mind.

I’ll close out this blog entry with a few lines from the Korean War Memorial that seem quite fitting today as we still have troops stationed in Iraq and others attempting to keep peace in places like Bosnia. The first inscription is placed immediately before the memorial, “Our nation honors her sons and daughters who answered the call to defend a country they never knew and a people they never met,” and the second, located on a nearby marble wall, “Freedom is not free.”