I see a line of cars and they’re all painted black

Welcome to Washington DC, the home of the motorcade. Everywhere you go there are convoys of black Chevy Suburbans with blacked out windows, and men with curly wires disappearing down their shirts. Which is about as subtle as a house brick.  

We first had to attend to some business, as you can see.

President Deirdre and the First Pet

We headed to the Spy Museum where we participated in “Operation Spy”, a role-play mission in the fictional but very dangerous Kandar. We had to run around darkened laneways, break into a house and crack the safe, search rooms, eavesdrop on conversations and interrogate our suspect in order to Save The World from Certain Destruction! Aren’t you all lucky we succeeded? It was here that we met our personal operative, code-named “G- Gnome” – spying is in his DNA.  He showed us some of the sights of DC.

We noticed a lot of Secret Police around the place. We wondered if we should tell them that if you emblazon the words “Secret Service” all over your vehicle, it’s no longer a secret. But that’s Intelligence for you. “G” showed us how to blend in.

Washington is brought to you by the letter “M” – chock full of museums, monuments and memorials (not forgetting the Men in Black Cars, and motorcades). We did our best to see as many as we could, walking our legs clean off, but still left many things unseen.  We spent a whole day in the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum – interesting even for those of us who aren’t plane junkies. Some of their displays were a little out-dated it must be said – the section on plane design showed how they used the latest in 1980’s computers and stored the designs on microfilm. Hmmm. As we left Washington a few days later we stopped (very briefly!) in at the museum hangar at Dulles Airport and saw the Space Shuttle Discovery and the Enola Gay (plane that dropped the bomb on Hiroshima).

Lindberg's Spirit of St Louis

Space Shuttle Discovery

Other sites included the Capitol, White House, Washington Monument, Lincoln Memorial, FD Roosevelt Memorial, Jefferson Memorial, Martin Luther King Memorial, several war memorials including Iwo Jima, WWII, Vietnam and Korea, Arlington Cemetery, the Pentagon (now we’ve told you we have to kill you) – are you exhausted yet?  We went to Ford’s Theatre where Lincoln was assassinated and viewed a 4 storey high tower of all the books written about Lincoln – 15,000 or so books. That’s some reading list.

Ford's Theatre where Abraham Lincoln was shot

Lincoln Memorial

Marine's Iwo Jima Memorial

Martin Luther King Memorial

Our final museum was the Crime and Punishment Museum where we learned the shocking truth that TV Forensic shows aren’t realistic. Surprise! During our trip we have seen so many different types of police – federal, state, county and municipal all overlapping each other; some like Sheriffs are elected. And then there are some offshoots such as the somewhat strange US Post Office Police (“back away from the stamp, put your tongue where I can see it…”) so I thought mistakenly that the museum would help to clear this up. But no, it remains a mystery – they must all be tripping over themselves. A bit later we realised that the function of the PO Police is to stamp out crime. 

Michelle and Barack were co-chairing the National Book Fair just down the road from our hotel - we didn’t see them but they sure made a mess of the traffic with roads being closed and security everywhere.  Such is life in Washington.