Wanderings and Wonderings: Friday Night with the Memorials, Part II

The Lincoln Memorial is very stately, but unfortunately, there were too damn many people to give the great man the honor he deserved, so I basically took some pictures and fled the scene. I stationed myself on the back side of the memorial and sat against the pillars and enjoyed the [relative] peace of watching the sun fall over Virginia and the Potomac.

This picture was an accident, but I kind of like it.

Golden rays hit the back of the Lincoln Memorial.

I want to say that the mansion at the top of the hill above the bridge is a Lee mansion.

One of the things that cracks me up about being on the Mall is overhearing all the tourist families and the conversations they have when they are all clearly tired and overstimulated. For instance, a couple weeks ago I was on the Mall around 6 pm and I heard a wife hiss quite testily at her husband, "No, I am not going to eat a hot dog from a street vendor. I need a real meal!" These kinds of moments always make me smile.

I overheard another gem as I was waiting for the sun set. The bridge pictured above is guarded by lions, but there is a second fork of the bridge on the left (out of the shot) that is guarded by a different set of animals (I think moose?). A typical family with a mom, dad, and two sons that looked to be in middle school came up behind me, and the dad says to one of the sons, "Hmm, what do you think those animals are? Don't they look strange? What could they be?" The son turns to him, disdain dripping from his voice, and says, "They're dinosaurs, Dad." It was amazing. I remember being that age, and the moment was so perfectly illustrative of how you feel at that time. No matter how cool something is that you are experiencing, you certainly can't express it and even more certainly can't share it with a parent. I was chuckling about it for the rest of the evening!

Waiting for dusk.