We went sightseeing in Washington DC for 3 days and took in a lot of sites. There is a main strip of sightseeing places that stetches for a very long distance as you can see in the next picture. The main strip starts at the Licoln monument which is right behind this picture and stretches 2 1/2 miles (I think) past the Washington monument all the way to the Capital building that you can see in the distance. All along the sides of this park-like strip are other monuments and museums. All of these can be visited for free. A person could spend a complete day in each one of the Smithsonian museums. The big ones are the Natural Museum of Natural History, the National Air and Space Museum, the National Museum of American History and the National Gallery of Art (which we did not see). They are all air conditioned which was perfect because it was a scorcher outside. We bought tickets on a tour bus that took us to all of biggest sites, but the day was just not long enough to see them all. We did see the monuments below, as well as the Vietnam, Korean, Roosevelt memorials, and the Arlington Cementary. We seen the Pentagon in the distance but we did not go tour it. A reflective pool before the Washington monument (the spire) and the Capital building peeking by on the right hand side of the monument. This monument is for Abraham Lincoln. All of these monuments are huge and very impressive looking. The Washington Monument was closed for visitors as they were restoring some parts of the inside elevators. This is the Capital Building, the US's version of our Parliment Building. There is a statue on the top of it called Freedom. It designed it to face East so that "The sun will never set on Freedom". One other tidbit about it is that there is a bylaw that no buildings in Washington can be taller than the top of the statue. This means that there are no skyscrapers in Washington. The related saying to this is "Nothing is placed higher than Freedom". We did not have enough time to visit here. This is the US Supreme Court. We went on a tour of the White House. Obviously the tour was not through all of it (like the Oval Office) but we did get to see some rooms that they regularly use. The tours only run from 10:00AM to 1:00PM and they only give out a limited amount of tickets (I am guessing about a thousand tickets) that are free. They open the ticket booth at 7:00AM, but we were told that you should get there about 5:30AM to make certain that you get a ticket as they are first come, first served. We didn't get there until about 6:15AM and already the line-up was huge. It started at the doors of the ticket office which is is roughly in the middle of a city block and went to one end of the block. It then doubled back and went to the other end. From there, it went down (where we started) and then back the short end of the block and then stretched back along the long side of the block. From there it went down the other side of the short end of the block but I could not see how far from there. Each person could get 4 tickets each. This is a picture of the back lawn of the White House.