The Dad's trip to Washington, D.C,

What a journey getting this blog up has been!  When I tried to transfer the pictures from the dad's phone to the computer, I somehow created a Verizon Cloud account, and everything stored on his phone disappeared.  I lost his contacts, pictures, calendar, emails, messages...  All gone!

Last night I spent two hours on Live Chat with Verizon, and I finally got that stuff restored.  The phone set-up has changed a bit, but it's all there at last!  Whew!  He has to use that information for work all the time, and the pictures from his latest trip to D.C. were gone!  But all is now well again.  I'm thankful he didn't yell and stomp around, because I sure deserved it.  He was very rational (yet sad) through the whole ordeal.

So, here are the rescued pictures from his trip to Washington, D.C,  These are in reverse order.  This is the last picture he took.  The first pictures are at the end of the blog.

This is Union Station.  It is a good place to eat.  Some shopping.  It's the closest subway stop to the Senate side of the capital.  Union Station is the railroad terminal for the Union Pacific Railroad. Communiters use it from as far away as NY.  Amtrak has a big service desk in it.

A round trip ticket to NY is around $700.

On a walk, I passed the Fox News Outlet in DC, which is close to Union Station and the Senate side of the Capitol Bldg.

This is the front side of the Supreme Court Building.

If I ever go again, I will try and take a picture of the long side.  It's about 2 1/2 times longer than the front is wide.

This time, they had finished the work using scaffolding around the rotunda and dome.  So now it looks better.

The building is wider than this.  There's another wing for the House, and another wing for the Senate.  The Senate is on the right side, and the House is on the left side facing this picture.

This is the north side of the White House.

This is me at the north side of the White House without a selfie stick.

GEICO stands for Government Employee Insurance Company, which is now available to everybody.  I took this picture because of a geocache.

The back of the GEICO sign.  Can you spot the geocache.  It's a nano stalactite centered on the bottom crossbar.

I found this nano cache in Friendship Heights, MD.  You can see the policeman's hat right behind me.

This is the policeman statue you have heard tell about.  His right hand points the way to the locaton of the cache.

This is in DC.  It is the location of a cache somewhat near the Hilton, where the Conference was held.

One of the hints was that it was small and near a donation bin for a thrift store.  It is a refector.

I took this picture of a statue of Longfellow because your mother and I listened to the story of "I Heard the Bells," this past Christmas.  That story was written by her quilting author.  I can at least listen to this Chiaverini story over again.

Sunday morning I made it to church.  Fast Sunday.  It took me an hour and a half to get there.

Fast and Testimony meeting was interesting.  One of the men, as part of his testimony, sang a song acapella.  It reminded me of growing up in Holbrook when Sister Fisher would sing her testimony.

At Mt. Vernon, they grew a lot of the food that they ate.  It is still a working farm, and this is one of the gardens.

This is the other side of the garden.

This is a grape vinyard near the garden.

Mt. Vernon does not have a front or a back.  It has a West front, which this is.

Here you see the visiting servants' quarters.

This is the East front enterance.

The East front and this big lawn is what you see in "National Treasure 2--The Book of Secrets."

This is the doorway to the basement which was part of the plot in Book of Secrets.  We could not take pictures in the basement, but they created the set in Hollywood, to be similar, but bigger so they could get cameras in.

These are various buildings for different trades that were all part of the plantation/farm.  George Washington not only married a rich woman, but he became a savvy business man, and was wealthy in his own right.

A shot of the weathervane

This is the east lawn overlooking the Patomac  River.  The dead spot is where they place all the tents for various functions.  In the movie, "Book of Secrets."  this is where the White Tent Pavillion was located.

This is the tour guide explaining about the tour.  The tree in the background is where Ben Gates walked up after his swim in the Patomac.

They day before I took this picture, there was a damaging wind.  The tour guide explained that there were three trees that can be identified as being planted at the direction of and during the time George Washington lived at Mt. Vernon, or were planted at his direction during the Revolutionary War.  The tour guide said because of that particular damaging wind, they are down to two.  Do you see the third?

This is the George Washington Masonic Memorial.

More evidence of the damaging wind at Mt. Vernon.

This is a geocache location in Arlington, VA.  I did this on the Friday of the damaging wind.l

This location is the birthplace of the Internet.

This is another location of a geocache in Arlington, VA, between my hotel and the Marine Corps Iwogema monument.

On the day of the damaging wind (remember, these pictures are in reverse order), I made it to Mt. Vernon, but everything was closed due to the wind.  There were many National Parks and Monuements closed.

This is a map of the Washington-Rochambeau Route to Yorktown which went through Mt. Vernon because George visited there before going toYorktown.

This is what I found at Mt. Vernon the first time I went there after taking 2 hours to get there.  It was on the day of the damaging wind.

This was the first geocache I found in Arlington, VA near the hotel where I was staying.

This is a little bit early for the cherry blossom time in DC.

The cherry blossom time usually starts about two weeks from when I took this picture.

Anthony Dimas, Bill Lee and me!  We are in front of the Washington DC Scottish Right Masonic Temple.  This building was featured in the Dan Brown book, "The Lost Symbol."

I took this picture on my way out to pick up the bus.

This picture was take Feb. 27, 2018.

It wa four days prior to the temple's closing for 2 years to receive major upgrades.

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The plane landed and I was waiting to catch the metro at Reagan National Airport.