My feet are killing me. I think we must have walked nearly 20 miles today. We headed out of the hostel around 8am this morning… the day starts awfully early when you share a room with 9 other people it seems. We headed out looking for food, and found none. Luckily Whitney thought ahead and brought some food.

We headed down to the Holocaust Museum, they weren’t open at that point though, so we headed back towards the Mall and got tickets to go up the Washington Monument. They were out of 9am tickets, so we visited the WWII Memorial. It was only a few minutes walk and quite nice.

Back to the Washington Monument and after about 20 minutes, we headed to the top. Afterwards, we spent a few hours in the Holocaust Museum. I didn’t learn too much that was new to me, but it did further drive home the horrors of genocide. It increases my confusion that we, as a society, can ignore genocide in places like Rwanda and Darfur.

Afterwards, we hit up the Museum of Natural History and took in an iMax movie (my first) in 3d. the content wasn’t too exciting (it was on Giant Kelp) but the experience was amazing. Several times I actually reached out in an attempt to ward away fish that were swimming towards my face.

The Library of Congress was next on our list, and was amazed by the level of detail that went into the entire building. It was absolutely beautiful, though I don’t know if I could stand to ever read a book there, I think I’d be far too distracted by my surroundings.

We found our way to Chinatown for dinner and then visited the Vietnam and Korean War Memorials and the Lincoln monument. The main thing that I was impressed by during the whole day was the sheer size of the buildings. Everything seems so close simply because of their immense size. DC is quite an amazing city.

12 hours in a car is definitely too long. I headed out at 6am, swinging by Walmart on my way to pick up Whitney for some electrical tape to cover my service engine light ($500 for a new catalytic converter when I get 30 mpg?).

I hit the interstate to find that my cruise control no longer works, sometimes it will work for about 30 seconds, but usually when I hit the set button, the dash light just blinks at me.

After 11.5 hours of driving with a cramped leg through Michigan, Ohio (thanks for closing our exit and not providing detour information), Pennsylvania, Maryland and Virginia we attempted to make our way to Fort Myers so I could drop the car off and hit the metro. After getting lost for a few minutes, we finally made it to the base. After a few hours of visiting with family friends, we hit the metro.

I was most impressed by the DC metrorail, having never been on a subway before. It was clean, fast and felt almost like an amusement park ride after spending all day in my car.

We got checked into the hostel just fine… it was larger than I thought, probably six 10 person rooms to a floor, with 6 floors of rooms.

Overall, it should be a fun trip.