Capitol Hill day in DC

Day two of our scheduled tours. I was not too thrilled about the Congress tour: I had been on it twice already. We got there early so we could see some things before going on the tour, but we didn’t get there early enough. It was exceedingly hot today. Our plan was to drop off our stuff at the Botanical Gardens near Capitol Hill, and then take the tour, since Capitol Hill does not allow food or drink in the place and offers no place to store it. Alas, the Botanical Gardens did not have lockers, so we moved on. The other thing I didn’t know about was that the Congress tour place had moved from the last two times I had been here. We made the march to where it used to be and signs pointed us towards the center of the front of the building. At the front of the building, the guards told us that the tour was on the far side of the other side of the building. There were fences all over the place from where we had just come, so no easy way to get around that way, so we went around the other way, and wound up almost entirely circling the building. When we got to the far side, we were further directed to stairs by the street some distance away. It turned out that Congress now had a beautiful underground entrance to the tour, but virtually no signage to get you there. We had now walked more than a mile in direct sunlight, and the first thing we had to do was throw away our water bottles. We really should have just gone to our congressman’s office and walked underground, like we had done last time. The tour sucked – it was a total waste of time. After that, we were back in the harsh sunlight. I did a little filming for class and then we went to a diner that had some good recommendations. The place was awful. Our next stop was about a mile away, so we trudged along in the sun. The halfway point to the US Department of Education was the Botanical Gardens. We decided to stop there briefly, but spent a lot of time there. It was a very interesting place, and turned out to be the most enjoyable part of our day! When we finally did get to the US Department of Education, it did not allow guests, even teachers. We could have gone to any of the museums on this side of the Mall after that, but we were too hot and tired. We had also seen all of them the last time we were here. We went home.