Touring the white house has been on my bucket list for awhile but I’ve been too lazy to do anything about it…so through a chance encounter, we met someone (a friend of a friend) who had two openings for New Years Day. At the time I was even MORE geeked because I thought the holiday decorations would still be up and Christmas is totally my thing…but unfortunately, the decorations were already down. 😥 The only slightly bad things were that 1) we would have liked to take the kids, but I wasn’t going to pass this up and 2) we had New Years Eve plans in New Jersey that would be cut a little short. But again we couldn’t pass this up. Uncle Rob was staying with us over the holidays so he watched the kids for us.
First stop: The Ellipse…and The National Christmas Tree.
“The walkway surrounding the National Christmas Tree features 56 state and territory trees decorated with handmade ornaments that are unique to each tree.”
Workers were maintaining the trains…
Vacuuming the tracks (I thought this was funny but if you think about it it has to be done).
There were so many people milling about that it took a few minutes before we could get in front of the White House with no one else in our selfie. 🙂 It was also hard to get the White House lined up between us because it was VERY bright and we could barely see the phone screen.
See? White House placement fail.
The hordes.
I just had to. 😆
Potty break. We sent it to Owen and told him it was a Pidgey (Pokémon) nest.
Starting the queue to get to the tour.
First ID and ticket checkpoint.
Through that building was the dog who sniffed everyone one at a time.
We couldn’t take pictures in one building, and then we were spit out here.
Entering the White House!
Unfortunately, it wasn’t so much a tour as a regular museum experience. There were lines and hordes of people just like every other museum so you had to wait your turn to poke your head through a doorway for 10 seconds or wait for people to get out of your way to see something on the wall.
I like that you can see my reflection in this one.
Gift shop at the start of the tour! We got a White House ornament.
This was literally a 3′ doorway to poke your head in to take a sweeping look around.
And look what was in the middle of the tour… 🙂 We each caught a few Pokémon and hoped they’d be good ones (they weren’t) but I now have a few I caught in the White House.
We opted not to wait in the huge line to take a picture directly in front of the Presidential Seal and doors so we got this instead. Had we not been trying to hurry, we could have tried to move to the side ever-so-slightly and hidden people behind Tom’s head. 🙂
And then it was done! They weren’t kidding when they said it only takes 45 minutes or so. I’m glad we did it, of course, but it wasn’t what I expected (though I don’t know why I was expecting an actual TOUR, like with a few people at a time—this is DC! Nothing happens without hordes of people!). The other bummer is that all the Christmas decorations were down. You were also encouraged to ask the guards about the house and the individual rooms and whatnot, but with as many people as were there and how crowded most of the areas were, you almost felt guilty if you held up the line just to chit chat with the guard.
We quick had someone snap this before more people walked out and ruined the shot.
See? The lady took a minute to reframe the shot and…people.
Fun with photoshop.
So, since we were in DC, we had to pick somewhere cool to eat—the Old Ebbitt Grill was on our way back to the parking garage!
The French Toast Breakfast Club (bacon-wrapped ham sandwich, apple compote, pecan butter, Vermont maple syrup) was DIVINE.
And then it was back to the car and off to New Jersey where we were going to be surprise guests!