Trial run on the metro and visiting the Holocaust Memorial Museum

Today was a great day to find out how smart you have to be to get a Metro Smart Ride card to work. We tried to insert our newly purchased Obama Commemorative cards into the machines that will add more dollars of credit to our cards. Once we realized that wasn't going to happen, we tried pushing the large card sized button that said Smart Ride and then add the credit. This didn't work either! So we finally went over to the station house and asked for assistance. Fortunately there weren't any crowds yet and the friendly Metro assistants were very helpful! Boy, did we feel like tourists when he showed us how to wave the card in front of the card sized button that said Smart Ride. You have to be smart to use the Smart Ride! It was a test!

We walked to the Holocaust Memorial Museum and were in line with a nice group of young people from Indiana, who were going to sing for one of the events. They were freezing in line too! Reading about how Hitler advanced himself as a Chancellor and took advantage of the chaos caused by a fire and then declaring himself as the leader, was just astonishing how easily one can manipulate his way to a position of power and abuse. The Danes were the only people who successfully protected their Jewish neighbors and friends from the German annihilation. It was encouraging to see so many young people interested in learning about this horrific period in history. Hopefully there will be enough people of every generation that will be able to recognise patterns or courses of action that might lead to such atrocities and stop the insanity.

We made plans earlier in the day to meet our niece Leslie, who graduated from John Hopkins Masters program in education and she now teachers in the Baltimore inner-city schools, for dinner. Since she and her wonderful boyfriend Jordan were going to a Capitals hockey game afterward we agreed to meet at Clydes that was next door to the Verizon Center where they were going for the game. That meant we needed to walk 14 blocks across DC, in the cold, to meet them by 5pm. We went past the Washington Monument and saw crews setting up the jumbo-tron screens for the Ingaugural Concert on Sunday that promised a great line-up of entertainers. They will be performing from the Lincoln Memorial that was waaaay down the Mall. We also walked along the parade route and imagined what it was going to be like with the huge crowds expected and lining the streets on Tuesday afternoon. It is going to be awesome! Just like the Whistle-Stop Train ride the Obamas and Bidens took today with stops in Philadelphia and Baltimore.