A few weeks ago, some Oratory students had the pleasure of going to the nation’s capital, Washington D.C. to tour around the most famous attractions. After meeting at OP on an early Friday morning, the group went off on a five-hour bus ride. Their first stop was the Air and Space Museum in Virginia. There the group ate lunch and toured around the museum. The group looked at planes and flew in simulators. They then left and went to Arlington National Cemetary. There, they saw the changing of the guard at the tomb of the unknown soldier and the eternal flame at John F. Kennedy’s grave. Then after leaving, we went to the national mall and stood where Martin Luther King Jr stood when he gave the I Have a Dream speech at the Lincoln Memorial. We then we to the very somber Korea and Vietnam memorials. The after dinner and games at Dave and Buster’s, the group went to the hotel to rest from the long day.

The group started the next day at the U.S. Capitol. There we had a tour of George Washington’s intended tomb and where they honor worthy government employees or soldiers. Then we went on a walk under the street to the Library of Congress. There they had countless books on display that only represented a small portion of the library’s real collection. Then we went to Mount Vernon, the former home of George Washington. The group saw where the first President is buried and got to see where he actually lived. After that, we sat down for a recreation of a battle from the Revolutionary War. After, the group went to the Kennedy Center to see where they honor some of the greatest artists to ever live and finished the day going to other memorials. We visited the Pentagon, the 9/11 Memorial, the Air Force Memorial, the Iwo Jima Memorial, and the World War 2 Memorial. At all of these places, you go see the pride and respect put into these monuments that commemorate all of these people.

On Sunday we got up and went to The Newseum, which had Newspapers from every important topic in human history and had part of the antenna from the fallen World Trade Center in New York. We then did another group of Memorials, starting at FDR’s and ending at Jefferson’s. Franklin D. Roosevelt’s had a section for all four of his terms and showed him just like he wanted to be remembered, just a normal person with a regular sized statue and sitting in his wheelchair. Then we went to Martin Luther King Jr’s Memorial where you could see him breaking out of the rock that represents him breaking the social molds of the time. And finally the Jefferson Memorial. Here we could see Jefferson in all of his glory surrounded by four of his most famous Quotes. After that, we went our final stop at the somber and tragic, U.S. Holocaust Museum. There we saw what it was like to see Hitler rise to power and see the terrible conditions and experiences he put the Jewish people through. After that, we all got on the bus and came back home that night.