Prepping for the Today Show

Up early....5:30...so we can check out and get into the city for the Today Show. On the way we made signs with all the left over cardboard from the cases of water and chips we consumed along the way.

MLK

FDR

Identification

The identification card you receive when you get into the Holocaust Museum

It has taken me two days of distance to log this journal entry. Up until this point most of this blog has been pretty factual... here is where we are and what we saw, but few comments about what we felt. The visit to the Holocaust Memorial requires a bit more about what we felt which isn't quite as easy to capture as a photo. 

When you arrive at this museum you are spoken to loudly by security, have your bags and body scanned, drink water from opened bottles to ensure it is really water (think about that for a second), then you are lined up and with many people over loaded into an elevator to go to the the top floor and when the doors open you see what the American troops saw when they liberated the camps like Buchenwald in April 1945. You wait for at least 20 minutes in a crowded space to watch a movie on the rise of the Nazis and you walk down 4 floors of some of the worst history known to mankind. You end in Daniels's story, an exhibit from a child's point of view....what his life was like before, then in the ghetto, then in the camp.

By the time you end this two hour journey, whether you are conscious of it or not, you are closer than you thought to trying to comprehend the incomprehensible. This is a statement not on how poorly the museum is set up, but how brilliantly it is structured. Add that to Day Six of our journey......when friends aren't getting along anymore because of close quarters, missing parents, misinterpreted comments.....and I think it is fair to say it was the most emotional part of the trip. It was a time in the trip to assess who we are and how we react to different situations.

If I had stubbed my toe, I would have cried for several hours and I haven't felt that way in a long time.

Lest You Forget The Things Your Eyes Saw

Only guard yourself and guard your soul carefully, lest you forget the things your eyes saw, and lest these things depart your heart all the days of your life, and you shall make them known to your children, and to your children's children.

Source: Deuteronomy 4:9

This quote is behind the eternal flame in the Hall of Rememberance

The Holocaust Museum

The amount of thought and effort that went to developing this museum to cover this genocide is amazing. Two hours wasn't enough time. It was a tough journey.

Two Young Jewish Boys in a Ghetto

Sacks of women's hair found during the liberation of Auschwitz en route to Germany.  

Mt. Ararat Meets a WWII Veteran

It was a real highlight to meet Wayne Nichols Sr. at the WWII memorial this morning. Mr. Nichols was visiting the memorial for the first time with his son Wayne Nichols Jr.

Mr. Nichols joined the war effort from his home in Chicago. He entered the Navy and served in the Pacific rim as far south as New Guinea and north as Japan where he was stationed in Okinawa when the atomic bombs went off in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. He was part of the team that escorted the US occupational forces into Japan. He came back home in 1946.

Thank you Mr. Nichols!

World War II Memorial

This memorial honors the 16 million Americans who served in uniform , of whom 400,000 gave their lives. It also honors the many millions who supported the war effort on the home front. This war was fought on six of the world's seven continents and all of its oceans and it killed a total of 50,000,000.

Maine represents! 

Chore Morning

Up at 6:00am to pack up the room after two nights of living in a small space and then 6:30am making 50 sandwiches.

Matchmaker

After a long day at memorials and museums, the only question I received repeatedly was 'how much time to I get to get ready to dress up for dinner?" Tonight we are all dressing up to see Fiddler on a Roof  at Toby's dinner theater in Columbia. Kids get to sit with kids and adults with adults. It was a theater in the round set up....and fabulous. And the actors were the servers. Unfortunately, our waiter, "Sasha" captured the hearts of all the girls and was too busy signing autographs so it became self serve for the rest of us at intermission. Love was in the air.

National Museum of Natural History

Still so very cool. Still so crowded with school tours!

Mt. Ararat waits patiently in the beautiful sun of a spring day in DC

The 8 ton African Elephant Still Waiting for Your Entrance

The Hope Diamond

Picnic Lunch at the Hirshhorn Sculpture Garden

National Archives

History from Maine

"Stars and Stripes Nailed to the North Pole" 

Rear Admiral Robert Peary, Bowdoin Class of 1887

(Dude was a DKE)

Air and Space

The girls with Amelia and the Lockheed 5B Vega.

Four Score

Gettysburg, Pennsylvania
November 19, 1863

Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.

But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate -- we can not consecrate -- we can not hallow -- this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us -- that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion -- that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain -- that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom -- and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

Lincoln Memorial

Lincoln Memorial opens back up after a temporary, rushed closing. 

O

Vietnam Women's Memorial

Commorating the women who served in the conflict, most of whom were nurses. The three women are named Hope, Charity and Faith.

Hope

Charity

Faith

Vietnam War Memorial

Day Five: Korean War Memorial Starts it Off

The Korean War was fought between 1950-1953 which started when North Korea attacked South Korea June 25th. US joined UN forces in support of South Korea's struggle to remain democratic and the US efforts are commemorated with this memorial. The 19 stainless steel soldiers are walking amongst scrub brush resembling the Korean terrain and are reflected in the wall doubling their count to 38....... a symbol of the 38th parallel they fought over.

Here is Mt Ararat hiking in parallel. 

9/11 Pentagon Memorial

It is hard to believe that this day started in he battlefield of Gettysburg because it seems so long ago. And now we are at the 9/11 Memorial for the Pentagon to end the day.

At 9:37:46, American Airlines Flight 77 hit the Pentagon. A total of 184 men, women and children died in the terrorist attack, the oldest was 71 and the youngest was 3.

The memorial was designed to commemorate each person, their age, and whether they were passengers on Flight 77 or in the Pentagon. Each person has a bench over a babbling fountain, and lit from below. Nighttime was a particularly solemn time to visit.