Urban travel today is likely to involve routes underground, whether you are in a vehicle or afoot. A tunnel in the central civic-ceremonial zone of WashDC.
Ronald Reagan building parking/security team joke.
A rose to you for getting through the traffic.
How many US citizens under the age of, what?, 40? know what this is…that it’s not just an aesthetic combo of shapes and colors. Often, in my (limited) experience, the eraser would solidify and the bristles would get bent before the eraser was used up.
Our first stop: the Verrocchio exhibit at the National Gallery of Art. Verrocchio has many names in the literature (WikiPee indicates his birth name was Andrea di Michele di Francesco de’ Cioni), but most cognoscenti refer to him as merely Verrocchio, referring to the goldsmith he trained under, poor guy. He was an accomplished goldsmith, architect, painter, and sculptor. One of his mentees was Leonardo da Vinci.
Verrocchio’s Alexander the Great. Is that a dragon on your head, sir?
Love the sandal strap details. Many art historians think Leonardo painted the ghostly terrier.
This is Goliath’s head with David’s foot in Verrocchio’s version of the same moment as the famous Donatello statue of David. We saw the latter in Florence; I like both. Again: footwear detail.
We got lunch in a downstairs museum café, and headed to the mall. Left: view of Capitol Hill. We went that way last time. We went the opposite way this time.
Toward the Washington monument, all sparkly clean and open for business again.
And from the hill at its base, we could see our quarry, the Lincoln Monument. But first, at this end of the Reflecting Pool, the WWII Memorial.
Sobering to see over 4000 stars here, each representing 100 American war dead.
We climbed out, paralleled the pool, and worked our way through the crowds up the steps and into the main room of the Lincoln Monument, which the Romans would have called a cella. Many old guys in wheelchairs…this weekend’s groups of Honor Flight members and their attendees. One group whose members we kept encountering were from “Flag City,” Ohio.
We tore ourselves away from the Abe and visited the Vietnam Maya Lin wall. Sobering also. It’s all about the names, each life lost.
Enough malling, we headed back to our parking garage. [Ended up with 16K steps for the day. Outdoor mall-walking.]
The “island” out there is a sunken ship. There are over 230 of them in shallow Mallows Bay, on the Maryland side of the Potomac, a bit downstream and opposite Quantico. Look at GooSatView and see how many you can count. Many are steam ships and many date from WWI.
We paid $6(!!) to cross this bridge over the Rappahannock, the next big river south of the Potomac, both flowing into Chesapeake Bay. The beams are pretty, and the light was nice, but I prefer the bridge that spans the two peninsulas way NNW of here, plus the crossing is cheaper.