I highly recommend that if you are in DC to tour monuments, museums and parks, that you do a night tour. You can arrange with a tour group or just go on your own. Our last walk was on a warm spring evening and there were loads of people about. We walked around the Tidal Basin and past several monuments, Martin Luther King, Jr, FDR, Jefferson among them. This view of the Washington Monument is from along that walk. Lovely at night. Today would be a great day to do so, according to John Adams who wrote to his wife upon the passing of a resolution of independence:
"The Hopes of Reconciliation, which were fondly entertained by Multitudes of honest and well meaning tho weak and mistaken People, have been gradually and at last totally extinguished. -- Time has been given for the whole People, maturely to consider the great Question of Independence and to ripen their judgments, dissipate their Fears, and allure their Hopes, by discussing it in News Papers and Pamphletts, by debating it, in Assemblies, Conventions, Committees of Safety and Inspection, in Town and County Meetings, as well as in private Conversations, so that the whole People in every Colony of the 13, have now adopted it, as their own Act. -- This will cement the Union, and avoid those Heats and perhaps Convulsions which might have been occasioned, by such a Declaration Six Months ago.
But the Day is past. The Second Day of July 1776, will be the most memorable Epocha, in the History of America." Jn Adams
