Tuesday's First Adventure, The Library of Congress

Well, here we go! A once in a lifetime opportunity.  This is an experience we will never forget, visiting our nations capital and seeing Steve receive his Congressional Gold Medal.  I thank God we got to be a part of this.  We arrived in Washington D.C. Monday evening.  We settled in and made plans to meet Keri to tour D.C. the next day.  Boy, did we ever tour.  I know we just experienced the tip of the iceberg but our day was amazing.  We walked over 8 miles on this drizzly, rainy day.  We enjoyed every minute.  Thankfully, Keri had visited D.C. previously and she was willing to be our tour guide.  

This was the first statue of many that we saw.  Statues, police, security guards and secret service are all over D.C.  This is Nathanel Greene.  He was a major in the Continental Army during the American Revolution.   I mentioned to an Uber driver that D.C. would be a confusing place to drive.  He said it was made that way on purpose.  Harder to invade!  Interesting.  It does make sense.

 Our destination was the Library of Congress which is close to the Capital Building.

On our walk to meet Keri we also passed the Supreme Court.  It was just amazing to see all these places that we have heard so much about.

Here is the Library of Congress.  All the buildings are enormous and this was one of the biggest we saw.  I couldn't get it all in one picture unless I hiked back a long way.  This is the center.

The right side.

 The left side.

The inside was exquisite, superb, magnificent and more.  The Library of Congress holds collections of things I would have never imagined. Stradivarius violins, flutes, baseball card collections, Bibles, old maps and so much more.  I looked up how many items are housed in the Library.  As of 2017, 167 million items are in the Library of Congress. So many things it would take hours, probably days to really see everything.

This is the map room.  The Abel Buell Map was the first map made and published by an American after the end of the American Revolutionary War.

 The designs in this room were all created by small tiles.  That had to take so long.  The pictures are paintings.

 True, all tiles.  Someone had a lot of skill and patience.

 Here are some of the things we saw.

Keri and Mike outside the office of the Librarian of Congress. 

The Bibles were in different languages.  

 This was pretty fascinating to me!

The whole library doesn't show.  There are four categories of books in this library. They are listed below.  There is a lot of reading here!!! 

 The four categories.

 Thomas Jefferson held these books in his hands and read these books with his eyes.  Wow! How do we know that?  They have the green ribbons.

 There were at least 15 Bibles with green ribbons.  Glory to God.

This is the library where official people can go and research and study.  I am not sure how you qualify to be an official person. Senators, Congressmen, Judges?  My guess is if any of those people need research done they have people to do it.  I did know that we did not qualify to enter the room.

 So beautiful.  Stunning.

This explains the book in the pictures below.  It is a bit blurry but still readable.  

The Library of Congress is very difficult to describe with words on a page.  We were soon to find out that most of the day was going to be like that. The architecture in the Library of Congress is unique and just incredible.  Everywhere you looked you would see something that took your breathe away.  Imagine the work that went into all of this.  If I remember correctly, it took 11 years to build.