We are not used to spending this much time with so many people in such an urban environment. So after 4 days of it, we opted to find a park to go for a hike in. Greenbelt Park is only one exit past the train station we have been using so it was easy to get to. It is actually a National Park but it didn't seem to require us displaying our National Park Pass to get in. We had a nice walk along several of the trails here and even though we were walking, doing so in the woods just seems more pleasant than what we had been doing the past few days.
We also read about the origins of the town of Greenbelt Maryland. Turns out it was a planned community back in the 1930's. Besides planning the housing, businesses, parks and all other infrastructure, the potential residents were screened and interviewed before being permitted to move into the town. By the 1950's the town changed to a more conventional one.
On our last full day in town, we headed back into DC but this time we would not head to the Mall, but to the north west side of town with the zoo and Embassy Row being our main destinations. This would require us to actually transfer from the Green train to the Red train at Gallery Place. Fortunately being a Saturday, it wasn't as busy as it could have been. Based on other info we read, we stayed on the Red train to Cleveland Park - one exit beyond the Zoo's stop. Supposedly this makes the walk to the zoo downhill.
It was a nice day so the place was very busy but we enjoyed walking around and seeing other types of sights. The pandas were likely the busiest location. We did manage to see one of them outside but not any others. I would say we enjoyed the trip and although it is a nice zoo, I might have been expecting better.
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| Panda Outdoors |
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| Ostrich |
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| Elephant Throwing Dirt |
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| Big Fish with Bright Scale Tips |
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| Underside of Catfish |
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| Lions Lounging |
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| Taking a Nap |
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| Tiger on the Move |
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| Turtles in the Sun |
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| Silverback Gorilla |
From the zoo we headed to the National Cathedral. It is only a little over a mile walk so not too bad. The earthquake that shook DC back in 2011 had caused a fair amount of damage and there is still some scaffolding up on the outside for repairs. We decided not to spend the $12 per person to go into the cathedral. It is a very big, beautiful and ornate building.
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| National Cathedral |
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| Front of Cathedral |
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| Other Building on Grounds of Cathedral |
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| Scaffolding Around One Tower |
From here we headed southeast on Massachusetts Ave to go past many of the foreign embassies located in DC. Some of the embassy buildings were old and ornate, others were more modern and odd looking. One that surprised us was the Haiti Embassy building. For such a poor country, its embassy was extremely elaborate. A few other sights were seen during the long walk back to the train station at Dupont Circle. This allowed us to take the red line back to the green line and to Greenbelt.
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| Winston Churchill in front of British Embassy |
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| Nelson Mandela at South African Embassy |
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| St Jerome at Croatian Embassy |
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| Surprisingly Ornate Haitian Embassy |
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| Gandhi Statue |
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| Indonesia Embassy Entrance |
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| Statue at Indonesia Embassy |
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| Inside the Train Station |
Our general impression of the trip to DC was a good one. There is so much to see and do that it really cannot be experienced in a one week trip. But it is definitely a tourist kind of stop. People weren't coming to the campgrounds to "camp" but to use it as a home base while visiting the area. Maybe if we were younger, we could have spent more time doing the tourist thing, but that many days in a row just seemed to be taxing, so maybe we will come back again someday and experience other things we missed this time.
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