It was a 24,000-step day. The weather was warm and beautiful for today’s trip to Arlington Cemetery. We spent 4.5 hours walking, finding lots of interesting memorials and gravesites, and still didn’t see most of the cemetery. Carson really liked it, all the history and famous people.
Here are only some of the headstones we tracked down...RBG, John F. Kennedy and the eternal flame, the Challenger and Columbia astronaut memorials, Battle of the Bulge, and PanAm Flight 103 memorial.
I didn't know, but one of Dan's favorite WWII heroes is Jimmy Doolittle. Dan took exactly one picture of the whole trip, and it was this tombstone of his hero. We found out after we left that John R. Boyd was buried there too, the man Carson did his History Day project on. Carson would have liked to see that.
There were funerals happening all day long. The flag-draped coffins were brought through the cemeteries by horses on the back of this wagon. We heard 3 gunshots at every funeral, bugle songs, and once we even saw the missing man formation overhead when jets passed by the cemetery for a funeral. We also heard, far away in another part of the cemetery, "Amazing Grace" being played by bagpipes.
We watched the changing of the guards at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier and then realized we were there for a bonus wreath changing ceremony.
Leaving the cemetery in traffic, we missed our turn and found by accident the famous Marine Iwo Jima Memorial in a nearby park.
Next we hiked Great Falls State Park along the Potomac River. There are ruins of an old canal built here long ago.
