6/14/2014 0 Comments HIlls and Somber MomentsFirst off, I hope that all of the students and chaperones' fathers had a wonderful Father's Day! Today was such a somber day compared to our more fun and entertaining day yesterday. This was our marathon walking day. We started our day at Mt. Vernon. We walked down and paid our respect at President and Mrs. Washington's tomb, then walked up to the mansion and looked through the slave quarters and other outer buildings. We toured the mansion at 10:15 and got to see George Washington's presidential chair, the key to the Bastille in Paris that was given to him by the Marquis de Lafayette, and the bed that Washington died in. In the museum students found Washington's dentures, which always make people cringe thinking about how painful they must have been to have in your mouth. We had a quick lunch at the Pentagon City Mall and then headed to the Holocaust Museum. Our group toured the permanent exhibit and experienced a very emotional hour. They was a pile of shoes from victims at Auschwitz, one of the cattle cars used to transport victims to the camps, items destroyed in Kristallnatcht, and bunks from Auschwitz. They also saw the US Holocaust Memorial and the eternal flame in the Memorial Hall. After studying the Holocaust a couple of different times during their years in middle school students always look forward to the museum, but nothing prepares one for the emotional toll this museum can take on a person. It definately changes your perspective after a visit. From there we headed to Arlington Cemetery to pay our respects to the men and women who have serviced our country in the military. This is another sobering moment for our students. Seeing the long rows, row after row of headstones gets overwhelming at times. Then when we start talking about the life stories of many of the individuals buried at the cemetery and you start getting the person point of view it becomes more than just the headstones and names. We decided to have students and chaperones select which group they wanted to tour with. We had one group that did a highlights of the cemetery tour - the Kennedy family gravesites (President Kennedy, Robert Kennedy and Edward Kennedy), the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier and Arlington House - which was owned by Robert E. Lee's wife, who happened to be the great granddaughter of President Washington. The other group was a tour of some of the more unique and less popular areas of the cemetery. I led this second group and the students and chaperones decided they wanted to see the graves of many of the astronauts buried in Arlington Cemetery, including Indiana's Gus Grissom and Roger Chaffee, who both died in the Apollo1 fire, and Stuart Roosa, Donn Eisele and Jim Irwin who were all Apollo astronauts. Most of these graves are in a far corner of the cemetery and are quite a long hilly climb to get to. Twenty students and 10 chaperones elected to take see these graves and we powerwalked our way across most of the cemetery. They were all troopers, kept up, and asked great questions as they saw something on a headstone or thought of a question about the military or protocols at the cemetery! Then we headed to the Tomb of the Unknowns to watch the Changing of the Guard. Our two groups both saw the same Changing of the Guard ceremony! Then my group headed to see the Kennedy gravesites as we headed back to the bus. This group saw some of older sections of the cemetery, including many of the Spanish-American War and World War I graves, the Fr. Myer chapel, the memorial sections of the cemetery where there are headstones for service members killed but no remains could be recovered. After two such emotional and intense places it was time for some Irish food at O'Connell's in old town Alexandria. Our final stops tonight were some of the monuments and memorials. We visited the World War II Memorial, the new Martin Luther King, Jr. memorial, the Franklin Roosevelt Memorial and the Thomas Jefferson Memorial. We enjoyed this night tour since the memorials look so different when they are all lit up at night, and it was late enough that we pretty much had the memorials to ourselves and we weren't fighting any crowds of tourists and school groups. Tomorrow is our final day of the trip. We start at the Embassy of Switzerland and we are all excited to say that we have been to the country of Switzerland following this visit. Once you step into an embassy you have technically traveled "to" that country. We will tour the National Cathedral, and then do some fast shopping at some of the cheaper souvenir shops in town. We will have a pizza lunch on the National Mall in front of the Smithsonian Castles and change into comfortable clothes. We will spend a few hours seeing the various Smithsonian museums and then take the Metro subway to dinner. After dinner there is one quick monument left to visit - the Iwo Jima statue, also known as the US Marine Corps Memorial and then it will be on the road and headed back to Indiana. I will spend many nights over the next week or two still posting photos, so as the students get home and have photos they would like to email me to share on the website, please encourage them to do so! Chaperones will be getting me most of their photos tomorrow and little by little I will continue to get them posted. If you have not seen a close up photo of your student yet I will try to make sure one gets posted sometime this week or next week. There have been a couple of students that have been avoiding the multiple cameras the adults are using at all costs this week! So, keep those photos coming in through the submission page on my website or just email them to me. Thanks for the lovely comments to my previous postings - it is nice to get some fee
Step count update: 20,146 steps = 8.99 miles
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |