This post is part 2 of my visit to the National Mall in Washington, DC, where we gained a day-off of two while traveling back to Ottawa, and conveniently it happened while we were near Washington, DC.

Earlier in the day we had been to the White House, the Capital Building, the National Monument and the Canadian Embassy. And in the last post where I left off was when we were walking down along the 600+ m Reflecting Pool at the west end of the park, in front of the Lincoln Memorial (the large pond that we see in the movie Forest Gump when Jenny runs through the middle of it to talk to Forest during a war protest).

Next we progressed down to the Lincoln Memorial that was built to honor President Abraham Lincoln and witch we came to realize was some pretty fascinating architecture project. The building resembles a Greek temple style structure with high sculpted pillars (witch you can also see on the American penny and the dollar bill).

Lying between the north and south chambers (that contain the words of Gettysburg Address and Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address inscribed on the walls – both famous speeches given by Lincoln) is what they refer to as the central hall; here is where the famous statue of Lincoln sitting in contemplation is located. The Lincoln statue was built in 1920 and is almost 20 feet high and would be as high as 28 feet high if Lincoln were standing instead of sitting down.

From there we headed south along the river past several baseball diamonds till we came to the Thomas Jefferson Memorial, another very interesting architecture structure built to honor the third President of the United States. The Jefferson Memorial building is composed of circular marble steps that lead up to a circular colonnade of large pillars, covered with a shallow dome that houses a large statue of President Thomas Jefferson.

After we had finished walking all around the Nations Capital taking photos and looking like normal tourists we headed back to the hotel across the river with a quick drive by the United States Pentagon (the headquarters of the United States Department of Defense) for one last American National Attraction. Here I didn’t bother to stop just to avoid any security problems that may arise for taking photos of Department of Defense property (something I learned should be avoided from a different trip… ) and also because security is much tighter here since 2001.

Over all the day off turned out to involve much more walking then I had originally anticipated but all was good and now I can say I have been there (didn’t get the T-Shirt though) and can cross that off my list of “Must See Places”. And the best part was I was getting paid to be here.