Day 266/365 Road Trip Day 2

This is what vacations are like when you have a child who's into military history.

First you spend the morning at the Holocaust Museum. (No photography allowed, so no preview for you -just go. It's amazing.)

After that, you spend the afternoon briskly walking to all the war memorials on the western end of the Mall. You walk briskly because it's 35 degrees, and your face is frozen in place.

But in spite of your eyes being frozen open, you still notice little corners of monuments you never noticed on previous trips.

Of course, sometimes you skitter to a stop on the icy cobblestone and wait while your child (the one interested in military history) takes pictures of a squirrel.

After remembering to stop and look up friends from the old days just so they know you haven't forgotten them...

You trudge up the steps to see the big guy.

Pausing at the top to realize that this is your umpteenth trip to DC and you still haven't been able to get tickets to the Washington Monument.....and you have approximately a mile to walk back to the Metro station.

Big Guy is still there, impressive as ever...

But have you ever noticed these murals, set up over the Gettysburg Address, in the wings of the Memorial?

And just to the left of the Gettysburg Address is a plain bronze door, unmarked in any way. Go through it, and there's an elevator. It only goes down one level, right into a small Lincoln Memorial museum.

My favorite part was this little alcove filled with multiple screens of the March on Washington and Dr. King, with audio of his speech playing as you watch the changing photos.

There there's the Little Guy, forerunner of the actual sculpture upstairs over your head.

And some of Abe's best words (and most prophetic I think, living where I do)

Afterwards, with numb feet and blue fingers, we trudge appropriately towards Korea, having by this point some small inkling of how soldiers felt over in that frozen muddy cold wasteland.

This is a war memorial that gets up close and personal - you can see the lines in the faces of these battle-weary soldiers. Sometimes out of the corner of your eye, they seem alive.

Wary looks for snipers, the crunch of boots on ice, the crackle of the radio -it's all here.

All that "glory of war".

And the American soldier that gets sent to do the fighting for the old men in the suits.