Day # 6 of the vacation

So I get up today, and go downstairs to attempt to find something to eat at the hotel breakfast area, which truthfully hasn't been that wonderful.  So I decide that I'm going to have an English muffin.  I never have the things for breakfast, so how bad can it be in comparison to poorly prepared eggs or soggy bacon...right?  So they have one of those toasters where you put the toast on the tray and it slowly rotates the bread under the heating element and eventually it pops it out, all toasted and all.  Except for one thing.....I'm standing there and Kim walks over and looks at one of my muffins pops out.  She looks at me sorta funny and I tell her that one of my muffins still hasn't come out yet.
"Um, didn't you know that you were supposed to slice the muffin in half?"

Hey.....who knew?  Meanwhile I'm trying to avoid everyone in the breakfast room noticing that my english muffin appears to be on fire.  What a way to start a day.

So we decided to go to the bureau of engraving or, as Kim calls it:  "where they make the money".  This is actually one of the places that Kim is really looking forward to seeing and we're walking down the street towards it and right in front of us we get to experience a lovely early morning car accident.  One car totally T-boned  the other...glass and metal strewn everywhere.  Geez, I had barely been up an hour and I had almost started one fire and had witnessed an accident.  So as we get to the engraving place, we're told that the building is closed until like 2006.  Why?  Its those Al Qaida bastards life difficult for tourism!!  So as we're walking along trying to find a place to go too, we pass in front of the National Holocaust Museum.  We decided to go into there.

It is the one place on a visit to Washington D.C. that everyone should go too.

Absolutely devastating.  If you go, whether you are Jewish or not, and are not moved emotionally by what you see, you're either devoid of human feelings or just incapable of grasping history....or maybe both.  You walk in and are handed "identification papers" of someone who was alive during WW II and lived during the time.  It gave you a brief biography of the person, and told you of their experiences during the time.  So here I am, walking along the tour and I'm reading some brief facts about Marcus Fass of Ulanow, Poland.  And then I get to the last page....Marcus Fass was captured in 1943 and never seen or heard from again.
Dead.  It sort of made the experience a little more personal.  I walked through looking at some of the relics of the time....the shoes of the people taken to the concentration camps....the bricks from the Warsaw ghetto....the video showing the results of some of the "experiments" of the Nazi doctors.  It was absolutely horrible, and yet I was fascinated from a historical point of view.  It is a place that must be visited.
After a brief lunch at a downtown Subway's, we went across the street to a place the kids had really been looking forward to visiting--the international spy museum.
I must say, its really good stuff.  Again, lots of really informative stuff and they try and personalize it by having you assume an identity that you have to try and remember at the end of the tour.  Top notch stuff, and one of the things that I remember is that there are belived to be at least 1,000 people operating in what is said to be "covert operations" within a one block radius of the building.  Yikes!

End of day # 6