Last day
Today is the last day of my USA trip - awwww! I reached Washington DC on Friday night and was met by Chris & Cate, who couchsurfed with me in Belfast just before Christmas last year. They're a really great couple and I've now got to meet their two dogs, Wendy and Blue - very cute! Yesterday Cate & Chris took the whole day to show me round DC. We parked beside the Pentagon (that is one big building!) and got the metro into the city and headed for the International Spy Museum which was pretty good, some cool interactive stuff - kids will love crawling along the air conditioning duct like a true spy! At lunchtime we headed for the White House and took the customary photos then walked along Freedom Plaza. The temperature here has been a bit of a shock to the system - really high humidity and it was in the 90s yesterday so I was baking! After lunch we hopped on the metro to Arlington Cemetery. I hadn't realised how huge a place it is, something like 624 acres. There's still an average of 24 burials there each weekday. Walked to John F Kennedy's burial site and the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier to see the changing of the guard.

Then we decided to head out of the city and we went to Great Falls National Park. Americans really know how to do their national parks! The Great Falls themselves are really stunning...and put me in the notion for more kayaking, though it's extreme stuff, Class 5-6. We saw a couple of kayakers putting in below the falls. It's a good spot for rock climbing too and we watched a girl climbing up a rock face amid various screaming along the lines of, "get me out of here!"...I don't think she was too happy, but I'd be doing the same, I'm woeful with heights.

So I had a great day and was rather bushwhacked by the time we got dinner and icecream - being a tourist is hard work!

Alrightie, my next flight goes at 5pm, just some time left to relax with Cate & Chris and their family and then theoretically I should be on Irish soil by Monday 8.30am BST.