Trip Day 8: U.S. Capitol Building

We planned to leave early Thursday morning and drive to Ohio, but we decided at the last minute to tour the Capitol Building first.
We thought it might take an hour, then we'd be out of there. Ha! We were in line for 40 minutes just to get tickets.
It was a great tour, though, and I'm really glad we did it. It was especially fun to watch Brigham taking everything in. He loves architecture and was very excited to see the Capitol. We probably would have skipped it if he hadn't wanted to go so much, so I'm really glad he made us go.
Our tour guide was a very excited, very smiley woman with a strong New York accent.


Statue of Freedom in the huge visitor center where you wait for the tour to start.



The interior of the dome, in the Rotunda. The painting at the top is "The Apotheosis of Washington" (Washington ascending to Heaven and becoming a God. So why are Mormons weird for thinking we can become Gods??). The dome is so huge, it's almost incomprehensible. If you look at the painting waaaaay, up there, the figures painted are each about 15 feet tall, so you can imagine how big it is.

The painting around the circumference of the dome was of various scenes in the history of North America.



Brigham loved this tour.



Abraham Lincoln.



Statuary Hall. Each State has 2 statues of their choice displayed in the Capitol building, many of them here.




One of Utah's statues was Brigham Young, not surprisingly. Here's Brigham by his namesake.


After the tour, Ben went to go get the van and the boys and I walked (well, they walked, I wheeled) past the Supreme Court building and had an interesting discussion about what the Supreme Court is, and why they have so much power, for good or for bad. Just doing my bit to raise proper conservatives in my house!




We had a devil of a time actually leaving the city. We borrowed a GPS from a friend, and while it was very useful at times, it was really not helpful when it came to navigating Washington D.C. But finally, after retracing our steps a few times, we got on the Interstate and made our way out of the city.
We drove through Maryland and into Pennsylvania that afternoon, again, awed at the beauty of the countryside. We drove into Pittsburgh and got off to drive through the downtown a bit. Pittsburgh was absolutely nothing like I had imagined. I had imagined a rusty old industrial city, with a haze of brown hanging over the gray, drab, flat landscape. I have no idea why, but for some reason I had a really negative impression of Pittsburgh. Maybe it's the name? Anyway, Pittsburgh is totally opposite. It was beautiful and green with huge forested rolling hills and a big river, and a clean downtown.

Bad picture of the Pittsburgh skyline. There was one place where we came around the corner of the mountain and suddenly there is Pittsburgh spread out before you with a view of some of the beautiful bridges across the river. Of course, I didn't have my camera ready then, so this is the best I got.

After Pittsburgh, we kept on the road, stopped in the middle of nowhere in Ohio for Subway (really, the woman at the counter told us we were in the middle of nowhere when we asked) and made it into Ohio and stayed the night at an America's Best Value Inn (which is a debatable claim, in my book) in Kirtland.