Windwalker's Mountain Post: Washington, D.C.. -- Day 4

Today was about as calm and normal as D.C. ever gets. Sirens? Yes. Crowds? Yes. Traffic police whistling and directing at every corner? Yes. Horns honking everywhere? Yes...but as I said. A pretty normal day on the streets of D.C. True, there is an international conference on nuclear proliferation going on. President Obama gave the opening remarks this morning, and because of the international delegates, there is a whole section of D.C. blocked off, shut down, and buttoned up tighter than a drum. We're talking Secret Service, Special Assignment Police, humvees, huge dump trucks lined up to block off a street with lots of iron screening to make sure you get the message. On our final sortie this evening (to get tickets to the International Spy Museum for tomorrow), we walked by all of this and saw it firsthand.

Tonight, we'll pack up and be ready to move out tomorrow. We plan to visit the Spy Museum, Ford's Theatre, the National Portrait Gallery, and whatever else catches our attention before the shuttle comes for us at 3:45. So, in the interest of getting my packing done, the blog will be mercifully short.

We started our day at the National Zoo. We arrived at 9:00, just as the gates to the outside opened. The viewing rooms open at 10:00. Our biggest hope was to see the Giant Pandas, and see them we did. We even saw baby Bei Bei, sleeping in the top of a tree...swaying in the breeze as her mom crunched bamboo below, and her dad, in the pen next door, snoozed on his back. We saw several other Giant Panda happily stuffing bamboo in their mouths and crunching noisily. We saw just about everything there was to see in the four and a half hours we spent walking around.

At about 1:30, we cabbed back into the city for a visit to the Smithsonian Natural History Museum. Home by 4:30, we ate dinner and ventured back out to get our tickets for tomorrow. Rather than telling you anything more, I'll include some pictures from the day and bid you good sleep.

Impressions of the Day

Olivia: Cool how diverse all the animals were and wonderful to see how the environment needs diversity in order to function well.

Daric: Some of the people at the zoo were really funny. One lady got all excited about taking a picture of the crocodile and missed the reptile completely and shot a log in the water. I told her, "Excuse me me M'am, but that is the log in the water. The croc is over there." This was a bigger and more diverse collection of animals than I've ever seen before.

In the reptile house, a snake was eating a dead mouse...chewing and chewing to get it into its mouth and down its throat. Two little kids were pretty excited about seeing this process and called to their mom. She came over, took one look and said, "Come on, kids. That's really gross."

And so it goes in the big city.

Morning bamboo and tree run.