Jim&Mimi: What state is Washington DC in?

What a day! We rented a car in Annapolis and made our way to Washington. We only spent the day, but could have easily spent a week there.

The white house

I love museums and the Smithsonian has 19 of them! We actually only hit one, The Museum of Natural Resources and even then, we barely scratched the surface of what it had to offer.

We took a trolley ride through Washington and saw all the major sights, along with some lovely chatting with the tour bus drivers who are very knowledgeable. However there were a lot of sirens going off today, and specifically as the tour operator was telling us all about Washington DC's location. I wanted to know if it was in Maryland or in Virginia. He told us that it straddled both states originally, but since there was no need of about ½ the land, they gave that back to Virginia, but then the loud noise of the sirens blocked out everything else. We found out later that Washington is neither a city, nor a state and it does not reside in any state. It is a federal district all onto itself. It's land is unique in all of the states. In fact it would be against the law for it to become a state according to the constitution! Very interesting stuff. Unfortunately for Washingtonians that means they have no representatives in the senate.

All of this aside, we got to see all the monuments and there are many in Washington!

And then spent several hours in the Smithsonian Museum of Natural history where we saw so many things I cannot hope to include it all in this blog. I will however tell you that I saw Giraffes, Zebras, Tigers, Hippos, Rhino's, Leopards and Koala bears among many, many others. My sister Cécile just got back from South Africa and she saw all of these, but she had to endure a 36hr flight to get there and I have no idea how long the flight home was.

We got to see them all with only 1hr drive. There is the small detail, that she saw live ones and I saw stuffed ones, so granted there was a bit more excitement on her part!

We also got to see the Hope diamond. OMG that is one honking diamond.

Last but not least we got a little Canadian pride as we saw two displays that warmed our hearts. The first is the display of the undersea rover hanging in the Smithsonian and the second was the Canadian Embassy which is the only embassy that is located in the heart of Washington. All other Embassies are located across the Potomac River.