This past weekend I was able to travel to our nation's capital and take in the sights and sounds of that historic city. Whether it be the rumble of the subway, or the cool breeze as it blows the flags surrounding the Washington Monument, or even the setting sun as it casts its color across the capital building, all that we had the chance to see was worth seeing.

Sugar and I traveled to the outskirts of the city on Friday and met up with my brother and sister-in-law and then traveled into D.C. for all of Saturday so that we could take in as much as possible in a short period of time. Anyone who has ever been to Washington knows that everything is very far apart, and to get to most of it you need to walk there. We are very tired after seeing the Capital, Washington and Lincoln Monuments, the WWII and Vietnam memorials, the Air and Space Museum, Natural History Museum, and the White House.

The big highlights of the day were things that I had not seen before on my previous trips to D.C. While taking a look at the capital building, we took notice to the officer guarding the area. It is natural to see men in uniform in cities with side-arms, but this man had an M4. It wasn't pointed at the crowd and he was wielding it quite appropriately, it was still somewhat interesting having someone with that type of automatic weapon so close by.

The other major thing happened when we saw three helicopters fly past the Washington Monument. On careful consideration we determined that one of them held the President. They were heavily armed military helicopters, and by our guess, two of them were both decoys and escorts of the President's Marine One. As they headed toward the White House, and they split off in slightly different flight paths, and while the President landed, the other two flew back toward the airport. Fifteen minutes later we finally saw the third copter pass by us. We had seen the President come from his retreat in Camp David back to Washington. Needless to say, it was very cool.

In addition to all the walking, after leaving the Natural History Museum we saw this sight, and I ran half the distance of the National Mall (it's grass girls, sorry no shopping), in order to take this picture. In the end I was left more tired, but it was well worth it as far as I'm concerned.