I love Washington DC. The Iwo Jima Memorial is my favorite, though technically its above the National Mall. Its the absolute best place to watch the famous 4th of July fireworks. My dad (he was a Navy corpsman in WWII) always reminds me that there is a Navy Corpsman in the picture. The son of the only Navy Corpsman in the flag raising wrote a terrific book about it. 

I love the Lincoln Memorial, the Korean War Memorial, the new WWII Memorial, the Vietnam "Wall" (that's the little dust up that defined seven years of my former life when I enlisted in the Marines) - they're all great places to visit when friends or family are in town. We took my Dad to the WWII Memorial when they were with us for Christmas. You can't begin to understand "The Greatest Generation" until you witness a moment like this - my dad seeing the Navy insignia on the flagpole the WWII Memorial for the first time.




The Washington Monument is one of my favorites. I love showing people where the color of the stone changes at 152 feet up - because they had to stop building for a while and the second phase used stone from a different quarry. I also like asking people if they know (this comes from my habit of collecting useless factoids) what the rare metal is that tops the monument. Its aluminum, which was rare when the Monument was erected. What I didn't know until yesterday was the inscription on the aluminum. Then I read a column about it that said:

      My friend continued his lesson, informing me that the east side of the capstone
      at the top of the monument bears the Latin inscription Laus Deo, which means
      “Praise be to God.” As the sun rises in Washington, the first building it touches
      is the east face of the Washington Memorial. It somehow seems fitting that,
      as the sun rises over our nation’s capital, the first rays illuminate the
      phrase “Praise be to God.”

Read the entire column here.