The Cherry Blossom Festival

Warning: This may be a long post Due to the number of photos!

Last weekend we went to the Cherry Blossom Festival in Washington, DC. It's the first time I've been to DC during the Festival, which is hard to believe because I've lived so close to it for 20 years. But anyway, we got up on Saturday morning and headed out. We drove down to the Silver Spring Metro station and took the train in from there. Turns out that was a great idea because I heard parking was ridiculous. And for $7.50 round trip for both Mrs. Dave and I, you can't beat the price! Parking would have easily been more than that. We got off at Metro Central which dropped us off a few blocks further north than I expected, but it was Ok. We wouldn't have seen the Mickey Mouses if we had gone to the Smithsonian Station, so it all worked out.

Little boy was great through the whole thing, as exhausting as it was. The brief synopsis is:

1. Went to the parade 2. Had lunch at the cafe in the American History museum 3. Went to see the Cherry Blossoms at the Tidal Basin 4. Went to the WWII memorial 5. Trekked back to see the Mickey Mouses as we headed back to the train. 6. Headed home

Here are the photos:

Here is the first big balloon. Little boy knows Arthur, but I don't think recognized him at this size.

Here was the big star of the show. The police motorcycles and Mickey came a close 2 and 3, but this was definitely #1.


Here is one of the many tulips on display near the Cherry Blossoms. I don't usually do much floral photography, but this turned out better than I expected.



This was one of the few shots I could get of the blossoms that didn't have a crowd of people in it.



Here's the obligatory Washington Monument shot, but it was a nice photo. Too bad the base was a dirtpile. I'm not sure what they are planning on doing, but there's a lot of construction, mainly earthmoving and such for a large area around the base of the monument.



Here are a few of the pillars that surround the WWII memorial.



Here is another part of the WWII memorial. Each star represents 1000 troops killed in action. This is less than half of the display.



Here's a wide shot of the memorial. It was much larger than I thought it would be.



Here is Gary Baseman's Mickey Mouse, what would James Victore say if he knew?



Here's another Mickey, little boy loved this one of course because he's a train engineer.



There are a lot of photos I would have liked to take, but there were just so many people down there obscuring everything to some degree. This was especially the case at the WWII memorial. In the photo of the pillars above, I had to wait what seemed like forever for people to get their heads out of the shot. You could look between the columns that hold the wreaths. To give you an idea of the size, most people (on the other side) would not be taller than the slab on the column where the state's name is.

Dave