I was very happy to have had the time to backtrack and visit Washington for an afternoon. It's such a delight to visit. For being such a security-conscious place and the hotbed of political controversy, I have alway felt strangly comfortable in our nation's capital.

The first order of business in DC as a tourist is to figure out exactly which set of monuments you are going to explore. This is a necessity because everything pretty much sits along the "Mall", a lengthy, block-wide stretch of grass that runs from the Capitol building all the way down to the Lincoln Memorial. In the center of this stands the lofty Washington Monument and to it's side, the White House. Nearby, along the Potomac, you will also find the Jefferson Memorial. For the sake of conserving time and energy, you can only visit one or two of these at the most within a couple of hours on foot.

As always, my itinerary was determined by the nearest available parking space. As luck would have it, this trip was going to take me to see the Lincoln Memorial, a monument I have not visited since grade school.

As I closed in on this classic structure, I encountered a mass of colorful bicyclists that had congregated at the base of monument. Passing through the crowd, I climbed the tourist-covered steps and entered the building. There, in all its glory was the famous statue of Abraham Lincoln, seated in a chair-like arrangement of books, looking down on his admirers. In my mind was a sense of deja-vu. The previous evening I had witnessed this very same scene on my hotel TV screen. It had been playing the old science fiction thriller "The Day The Earth Stood Still".

Having absorbed the contents of this grand memorial, I made my way back towards the car. In the process I came across another nearby memorial, one recently dedicated to veterans of the Korean War. It consisted of a series of upright gray figures, a field of walking soldiers, shown as they might have been seen marching across the cold and damp landscape of Korea. It was a fascinating sight.