Franciscan makes an annual pilgrimage to DC for the March for Life at the beginning of each winter semester. Last semester, I learned that Brother Bear (another MA theology student) had never been to DC. So he, Shelly, Thom, and I decided to make a trip of it. We headed southeast on Friday to spend three nights at my house in NoVA and take DC by storm!
We left Steubenville running ahead of a winter storm, which pursued us all the way across Pennsylvania and down through Maryland, finally catching us as we ate a nine-thirty dinner and planned for the next day. Saturday, we decided, we were going to see all the city! Our ambitious list included: Arlington Cemetery, "the Smithsonian," the Capitol, the Supreme Court, the Library of Congress, the White House, and all the monuments and memorials. To make the list more realistic, we narrowed down "the Smithsonian" to a list of priorities (Natural History or Air & Space) and nixed the Jefferson Memorial as too far to walk.
Saturday morning we chipped ice off my car, hit up Mass, and headed into the city. The whole day, we trekked through ice and cold, but it stopped dripping pretty early on and my boots kept me warm. We kept running across clergy, religious, and groups of people with various diocesan names and pro-life slogans on matching articles of clothing. We made it to everything on the list, although we did not get into any of the government buildings (in spite lengthy contemplation about visiting Obama).
We witnessed to historic DC monument-moments. The Washington Monument has signs up explaining why it is closed: earthquake damage. The recently-opened MLK Memorial has a quote on one side that will be changed soon, to better reflect what King actually said.
No comments:
Post a Comment