travel dates: July, 2024
It is finally here! The last post about our summer 2024 trip! Just in time for us to have gotten back from our 2026 trip! Which, of course, more about that later. And about our 2025 trip. And…stuff. Also we just got a puppy, so I don’t know how I’m ever actually going to get anything done again! Who wants to see my puppy? Her name is Apple Pi, and she’s the smartest, best girl ever, but she’s still a lot of work. Why did no one tell me that puppies are a lot of work?!
I’m kidding. Everyone told me that puppies are a lot of work. And yet–look at her!
But back in July of 2024 we had only old dogs and a reservation for a tour of the White House. But then the van needed to go see a mechanic for a minor issue, and that delayed us enough that we needed to cut our DC visit short, which meant missing the tour. We’ve been to DC many times, so this visit was just kind of a random assortment of things we’ve always meant to get to. Also the American History museum, briefly.
We stayed at Lake Fairfax Campground in Reston, VA. It’s the same place we’ve stayed before, and you can read my review of it here. We keep considering staying at the very well-reviewed Cherry Hill Park and then deciding not to because it’s so much more expensive than Lake Fairfax. But I do think the transportation into the city would be a lot more straightforward at Cherry Hill. The drive time is not that different, but when we’ve taken public transportation we’ve run into headaches trying to find surface parking for the nearby stations. Also Lake Fairfax is electric only. But the sites are really nice (more spacious I’m sure than the private Cherry Hill, and it’s only $50/night. We really liked our site this time…until I noticed the giant pine tree leaning ominously over the trailer:
This was site #24. So maybe we wouldn’t get that one again.
We ended up with two full days in DC, and we spent the first one doing tours of museums (and, later, visiting Dave’s aunt and uncle who live in the area). We’d been to the Smithsonian’s Museum of American History before, but not for many years (and Abe had never been), so we made that our first stop. We were short on time so we opted to take a docent-led tour of museum highlights so we could be sure to hit, well…the highlights. I wish we’d had more time (I think we were there a couple of hours, but you could definitely spend the whole day), but we were glad we did it.
Here’s the car that completed the first cross-country road trip in the US. Relevant to our interests!
Then we headed to the National Gallery of Art for another tour. I think this one was about 19th century French art or…something, but we pretty much just picked the one that was available at the right time. I was surprised how very many people were on the tour! Anyway, obviously we only saw a very small part of the museum, but I’m a big fan of doing tours like this as a way to learn from people who know their stuff and keep huge museums from becoming just an overwhelming bunch of stuff.
Abe did not find the tour super engaging, but, luckily, he had a map to look at.
We did make sure, of course, to see Louise Bourgeois’s Spider after having been so enamored of her similar Maman at the National Gallery of Canada earlier in the summer.
Our second day we started off with a trip to the National Cathedral, which of course is an important pilgrimage site for fans of The West Wing owing to its prominent role in the episode “Two Cathedrals.” I’m happy to report that no one in our party extinguished a cigarette on the cathedral floor (we didn’t even smoke!) and that this was a really great stop and I’m so glad we finally made it there!
We opted to drive to the Cathedral and ended up parking a pretty good ways away on a residential street. I can’t entirely remember why; there is parking nearer, but maybe it was all in the form of parking garages that we wouldn’t fit into? When we left it was raining and we ended up taking the scariest Lyft ride of our lives in a car that didn’t seem to have the best brakes. But anyway.
The cheapest way to see the Cathedral is the self-guided tour of the lower levels. The next level up is a guided tour of the highlights of these same areas. But we opted to pay a good bit more (looks like it’s $40/person as I’m writing this) for the “Behind-the-scenes” tour and we were really glad we did. You get the benefit of a volunteer guide who really knows their stuff and you get to go to places not accessible to the general public, including close up views of a lot of the stained glass windows and going outside up high for some gargoyle time.
We got there with a good bit of time before our tour started, so we wandered around for awhile looking at things on our own. I should note that things are already pretty impressive even if this is the only thing you can do…so, while I recommend a tour, it’s definitely worth a stop even if you aren’t able to do one.
Abraham Lincoln turns up everywhere we go:
And so does Augustus Saint-Gaudens, apparently. At least on this trip:
I was surprised at how relatively new the Cathedral is. Congress approved the plan to build one in the late 19th century, but construction didn’t actually begin until 1907 and wasn’t completed until 1990. It’s an actual Episcopal church, not a government building, though of course lots of state funerals and whatnot happen there.
We saw a ton on the behind-the-scenes tour, but I kind of felt like a lot of it involved seeing this rose window from increasingly higher vantage points (which I am not complaining about; it’s a great window!):
But you see lots of other great stuff, too! Like you get to go up in the roof and see the trusses (metal instead of wood to reduce fire hazard):
And outside, up high:
After the tour was over, we gawked at some more stained glass, like this “Space Window” complete with actual moon rock:
…checked out the crypt level down below:
…and then visited the gift shop and the adjacent….lego cathedral!
The cathedral was damaged by an earthquake in 2011 and the repairs are ongoing. The Lego cathedral is a fundraiser to help cover the costs; for a small donation you can place 5 bricks and then check on the progress online here.
And with that, we were off to have a quick lunch and then head to our second stop of the day: Ford’s Theatre. As might be evident from my kid’s name, I’m a big Abraham Lincoln fan. And we’ve seen a lot of Lincoln-related sights in our day (like his birthplace. And his boyhood home. And his house, tomb, etc. in Springfield.) But we’d never made it to Ford’s Theatre before. Even though we’d seen the chair from there that he was sitting in when he was shot at–strangely–the Henry Ford Museum in Michigan. (I would love to link you to the post about Lincoln’s birthplace, except it appears that I never wrote one. I think it was during one of our many, many treks through the midwest for assorted kid college stuff. I also haven’t blogged about how we saw Herbert Hoover’s birthplace AND the world’s largest truck stop!)
So I have to just come right out and say that Ford’s Theatre was not my favorite Abraham Lincoln site. I don’t know what it was, exactly. It’s possible if we’d come on a different day or done a different tour things would have been better. But as it was, it was kind of a let down after our very cool cathedral tour earlier in the day. I mean, at least we went to the gift shop and tried on hats and got Abe a new Abe Lincoln shirt:
This is an NPS site but also a lot of it is run by a concessionaire, I guess? At any rate, it felt like kind of a regimented experience. You book a particular time and then you start off in the museum (or we did…I looked at the website now and it seems like none of the tickets include the museum for the foreseeable future, so I don’t know if it’s closed for some reason or what). This makes the museum fairly crowded, because there’s one big group that’s all in there at the same time for a set (pretty short) period. The museum kind of takes you through the Lincolns’ life in Washington and what happened the day of the assassination. Then everyone shuffles up to the theatre and finds a seat. I believe the booking site says a ranger will be on hand to answer questions, but, when we were there, a ranger gave an actual talk detailing the assassination and events before and after. So maybe if I didn’t already know all of this it would have been more interesting (also, we didn’t have the most…charismatic ranger we’ve ever encountered). At any rate, this was how that went for us:
I was expecting things to feel more moving and emotional, but…not so much.
And then you can go across the street to the house where Lincoln was brought after he was shot (and where he later died).
So, yeah. I dunno. They also offer tours through the neighborhood with people in period costume, it looks like. And you can still go to a performance in the theatre. Maybe we should have done one of those things!
And that was it for this time in Washington! Believe it or not, there are STILL things there we haven’t seen, so we’ll have to go back of course. Post from our last visit:
Two Days in Washington, DC with Kids: National Museum of African American History and Culture + More
And with that, I’m finally all finished blogging about this trip! We made one more overnight stop in North Carolina before we got home, but it was just a place to sleep so no blog post needed! So next up I get back to summer of 2025 and dig in on summer of 2026. Also I have some Disney stuff I haven’t posted about, which I should, but will I? I don’t know! And, of course, Herbert Hoover’s birthplace. Maybe.
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