Seeing a White House

The next day, the one planned for spending with relatives who couldn't make it at a VRBO that cancelled our reservation hours before without telling us, we instead drove to Washington D.C. I had called our next VRBO rental, while the rest of my group were boating at Niagara Falls, and asked if we could extend our rental by a day earlier. It was available and after wiring some additional money, we had it a day early. So we pretty much drove all day from Niagara Falls to the VRBO rental in North Bethesda, Maryland.

Six months earlier, we had written our Congressman, asking for tickets to tour the inside of the Whitehouse, home of all the U.S. presidents in office since John Adams. Two weeks before we left, they let us know that we had been approved though on a day before we had planned to be in Washington D.C. Thanks to the blessing of the cancelled VRBO, we could now make it happen. So the next day, we drove to an outdoor park and ride that could hold a 15 passenger van, and rode the redline, down towards the heart of our nation, politically that is. We walked towards the designated gate of the Whitehouse complex only to see a huge line stretching for blocks. It had me question the exclusivity of our tickets.

With some time to kill before our check-in time, we went to the nearby Whitehouse Welcome Center and asking the workers there, found out that the last four days, tours of the Whitehouse had been cancelled due to visiting dignitaries so all of those days had been rescheduled to our day. He assured us that while it would be crowded, we would still be able to get in at the scheduled time on our tickets. So we did stood in the long line and were able to get into the Whitehouse for a self guided tour.

It was horribly crowded inside so getting pictures without 50 people in them were a challenge but I got a few. I'm not sure where the above picture was taken but it was somewhere in the East Wing, opposite of the West Wing that the president uses as an office.

I was also able to get a picture of the painting on my personal favorite president, John Adams, a man who was complicated and often held opinions that were contrary to popular view but turned out to probably be the right view in the long run. 

I'm sure the location of this is very recognizable to most even though few have probably ever taken a picture of it from this perspective. Most see if from the perspective of all those people crowding up to the fence in the far distance of this photo.

Overall, I think my brother-in-law and his family, non-citizens of this country, probably enjoyed the tour more than I did. To be fair, I had a tour of the Whitehouse, a guided one back then, about 40 years earlier as part of a band trip when I was in junior high school so it wasn't my first visit. Back then though, the 30 of us kids had the place to ourselves and the guide showing us around and weren't sharing it with hundreds of other people. 

One last thing that really struck me as we were standing in line waiting for the tour to start. I, a middle aged white man, was very much in the minority. The line was full of recent and probably 1st or 2nd generation immigrants, all of which were very excited to be in that line waiting for a tour of the Whitehouse. In fact, during our three days spent in our nation's capital, this theme continued. It warmed my heart to see all these immigrants embracing our country and the freedoms it allows it's citizens. They weren't taking it for granted as most of my white middle aged male brethren probably are, present readers excepted of course.