We arrive early at the Gettysburg Battlefield Visitor Center, even after a wrong turn and driving through the town and back. (Wrong turns will be repeated at all stops today, including Luray Caverns, Pentagon City Mall, and the Radisson Hotel.) The students see the electric map, then a Battlefield Guide takes the bus around the site. Stops including walking at the Confederate and Union lines of Pickett's Charge and a hike at Devil's Den/Little Roundtop. Lunch is at Pickett's Cafeteria, then we drive to Luray Caverns, Virginia, in the Shenandoah Valley. The drive is over two hours, so another movie, "Dumb and Dumber", is played. The Caverns have impressive formations, not as large as Mammoth Cave formations, but quite striking. We see stalagtites, draperies, frozen waterfalls, reflecting lakes, and a stalagtite organ.
Another drive takes us to Washington DC. After more getting lost, we have supper at the Pentagon City Fashion Mall foodcourt ($6 vouchers). We are quite late arriving at the Radisson Hotel - Arlington. The chaperones each have a student group to look out for. Our team has two chaperones (Leslie Rice and I) and four students (Chris Dybash, Jim Zerelli, Aaron Rice, and Dale Gaarenstroom). The kids only get 25 minutes to swim in the hotel pool before the 10:15pm pool closing. Lights out is at 11pm. I share a room with Mr. David Deramo.
Wednesday, April 29
We are up early for a 6:15am buffet breakfast at the hotel.
The four boys in our group were up and ready early, much to my
surprise and pleasure. After breakfast, the buses are
loaded (some minor seating disputes involved here), we pick
up our DC tour guide, Ginny, and head for our first stop,
Arlington National Cemetery. We arrive about 5 minutes
before the 8am opening. We have a walking tour which
includes viewing the changing of the guard at the Tomb of
the Unknown Soldier and the JFK gravesite below Arlington
House (Robert E. Lee's estate mansion). The guides who
escort large tour groups in Washington DC are called "umbrella
ladies". They each walk with opened umbrellas of distinctive
color. This makes them easy to spot when a tour group gets
strung out over a long distance in congested tour sites.
We next drive downriver through the city of Arlington along the Potomac and travel to George Washington's home, Mount Vernon. We see the house, gardens, wharf, and tomb. The students enjoyed a box lunch picnic on the lawn outside the entrance. We next bus to the Holocaust Museum in downtown Washington and walk through "Daniel's Story", about a German Jewish boy. His life and diary are depicted in successive rooms as his family moves from a pleasant home to a crowded ghetto to a concentration camp. The new (April'97 open) Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR) Memorial was next. It has a park-like setting, heavily themed with large granite slabs and water (both turbulent falls and still pools). The final afternoon visit was Ford's Theater, where Lincoln was shot. It was very hot waiting outside (but perfect weather for street vendors selling cold drinks along the line). The Park Service narration in the theater was enthusiastically delivered and kept the attention of the hundreds of students packing the Theater.
We then returned to the Radisson to get ready for the dinner theater. In the lobby before boarding our buses, a number of moms snapped photos of a group of 6th-grade boys all with dress shirts and ties! It is an hour bus ride through DC to the Blair Mansion Inn in Silver Spring, MD. We enjoy a buffet, then watch and participate with "Now This!", a comedic improv group. The kids were delighted on seeing their suggestions worked into skits. It is another late night, back to the hotel at 10:40pm and lights out at 11:30pm.
Thursday, April 30, and Friday morning, May 1
We are up early again. Everyone has to bring luggage
downstairs and meet for breakfast buffet at 6:00am. Once
again I am astonished that the boys were completely ready.
And once again, the hotel staff was late in opening our
dining room, so more waiting. At breakfast we sing Happy
Birthday for Aaron Rice. We leave (late) to get tour
tickets at the White House Visitors Office. Unfortunately
White House tours were cancelled for that day, a not
uncommon occurrence (no explanations are given either).
Instead we watch a tour video, then do a walk-around the
White House and end at Lafayette Park. The 8th graders have
a group picture in front of the White House and the 6th
graders at Lafayette Park.
We next visit the Korean, Lincoln, and Vietnam memorials, all within walking distance and clustered around the Reflecting Basin. The new Korean memorial is tiny, but novel. It has 19 bronze soldier statues on patrol and a polished granite wall with pictures (both portraits and landscape scenes) etched into it. At the Lincoln Memorial, I point out to Dale and a few others that the statue's hands are signing "A.L.". We also have drive-bys of the Washington Monument and the Jefferson Memorial, both closed for repairs. (No cherry blossoms this late in the spring.)
The next stop was at Treasury's Bureau of Engraving and Printing. This tour to see money being printed is popular. Even with reserved-time tickets, we are in line for over an hour for a 20-minute tour. We see $1- bills in production. Lunch is at the huge (too huge to keep close track of kids) food court at Union Station, north of the Capitol Building. Following lunch, we arrive at the Smithsonian Institute museums two hours later than originally planned. The small groups fan out over the mall. I had reserved-time tickets to see "Star Wars: the Making of a Myth" movie artifact exposition at the Air and Space Museum. We barely arrive in time. The movie props and costumes are neat, but the introductory video was not. Also at Air and Space, we saw some of the usual attractions: Lindberg's Spirit of St. Louis, John Glenn's Friendship 7, two Apollo Command modules, moon rocks, and early aviation aircraft. We then walk across the mall to the Natural History Museum. There we see dinosaur fossils, the Hope diamond, and the superb gem-and-mineral display.
All groups met again at the Castle for a bus pick-up at 5:30pm and head to the Capitol Building. We line up on the east side (the less photographed side of the Capitol, with fewer stairs) for the group tours. We are briefed to keep voices to a whisper and enter the Rotunda, after the airport- style security check. (We are getting used to security checks, which were also done at the Holocaust Museum and the Bureau of Engraving and Printing.) Frescoes, friezes, paintings, and statues are all impressive in the Rotunda room. Both the House and the Senate were in session, so no viewing their chambers. We did see the old House chamber, now Statuary Hall with >50 statues from the States and the old Senate chamber, made to look like the last sessions of the 1850's. The Senate Guide was a stitch - part historian, part comic, part motivational speaker (Allard?). He recited his poetic tribute to Sen. Bob Dole, "The Measure of a Man", read into the Congressional Record on Dole's last Senate day. The Capitol was clearly a high point for the students.
Supper was at Scholl's Cafeteria, near George Washington University. Following, we had an illumination tour of DC monuments. We drove through trendy Georgetown and get off the bus at the Marine's Iwo Jima monument. This monument isn't in downtown DC, so it could be made taller than the 19- 1/2 foot limit of the Freedom statue atop the Capitol Building. About 9:30pm, we drop off our tour guide Ginny and begin the trip home. The in-bus movie is "Mighty Ducks 2". We stop at 11:30pm, 2:30am, and 6:00am (breakfast). In the last hour or so, the students get a little rambunctous. A couple pillow fights broke out. As a chaperone, I maintained a policy of containment, not neutralization. It begins to rain shortly before our arrival, the only rain of the trip. We arrive back at Carleton at 9:50am, only a little after our scheduled time.
written by Steve Gaarenstroom