Today we got up early (7:30am) to take advantage of the free breakfast in the hostel - cornflakes, bagels, a blueberry muffin and coffee - we had to wash our own dishes but we thought that was a fair deal!

We left the hostel for our full day of sightseeing in DC - first stop, the back of the White House for a few photos. It looked like Obama had the builders in as the whole back of the building was covered in scaffolding. We also spotted a press gantry filled with microphones and cameras - found out when watching TV later that it was all for the visit of Angela Merkel, the German Chancellor. We were suffering with the heat (high 80s) but kept seeing people out running and workers in their suits - they must have known something we didn;t about how to cope with the hot weather!

We made a brief stop at the Washington Monument, which was still standing despite the alien attack in The Event (only our Dad will get that!) and was surrounded by groups of kids on school trips. We thought it was quite funny that every school group here wears printed T shirts with the name of their trip and their school on - can't imagine us paying out for that at Whale Hill, these schools must be rolling in cash!

We then headed for the US Holocaust Museum, another fascinating and moving place, where we visited an exhibition called 'Daniel's Story', which gave a Jewish boy's view of the events in Nazi Germany. You could look around his house, followed by the ghetto where they were moved to. We also wandered through an exhibition on how the Nazis used propoganda to devasting effect during the war.

Next up was the American History Museum - our feet were starting to ache by this point but we ploughed on. Laura enjoyed the exhibition of the dresses donated to the museum by all of the past First Ladies, right up to the one worn by Michelle Obama for their inauguaration dinner in 2009. In another gallery we found Michael Jackson's famous black hat and Judy Garland's ruby slippers from the Wizard of Oz, which look a bit battered now!

As we made our way around a few other monuments, including the Lincoln memorial (he's massive!), we had to keep stopping to take a rest from the heat. We managed to cram a lot into one day, apart from the Martin Luther King memorial - I really wanted to see it, so we followed the map to the right spot, only to find that it hasn't actually been built yet and the whole place was a massive building site! We'll have to come back for that one...

Grabbed a sandwich for tea and then headed to the hostel lobby to meet our group for a trip to a local pub quiz in the Irish bar we went to the night before. There were 6 of us altogether, including our volunteer guide, who we can't remember the name of. The others were Rachel from Chicago, Matt from Pittsburgh (a very peculiar character!) and Jamie from Edinburgh - a friendly lot and we had good fun at the quiz after eventually managing to grab a table in the crowded bar. Laura impressed everyone with her knowledge of American trivia and we were both able to help out with the names of all four Teletubbies! The woman who ran the quiz was really funny and managed to keep all of the rowdy tables under control - definitely much better than the woman who does Quizgo at the Stap every week!

We eventually headed back to our hostel at 10pm, after another crazily busy day, to pack ready for our 6am start on Tuesday.