Capitol building tour

In the afternoon I had arranged in advance a tour of the Capitol building.

The building has been expanded and remodeled many times over the years.  It currently has about 16 acres of floor space over 5 floors.  It has over 540 rooms, 658 windows (108 in the dome) and 850 doorways. 

The panorama in the Rotunda didn't turn out as well as I had hoped.  Its 96 feet in diameter and the dome rises 180 feet high.  Really impressive.

This is the national statuary hall.  The House used to meet in this room until 1857.  The accoustics are generally terrible, but there is are two really cool places on the floor where you can hear someone who is whispering all the way across the room, even when there are hoards of other tourists passing through and talking.

Most of the working offices are in the administrative buildings across the street, so it was kind of cool to pass Speaker Boenner's office

This is the old Supreme Court Chambers.  

This is a model of the Statue of Freedom that sits atop the dome.  She is 19 feet high and the bronze statue was placed on the dome in 1863.  When her head was put on as the last step of assembly, there was a canon salute by the 12 forts surrounding the city.

I did not realize that seeing the House and Senate chambers was NOT on the tour, but required separate admission tickets to be obtained from your member of Congress, whose offices were across the street in (unknown, vast administrative complexes).   This did not deter me from getting a tour. I knew Congress was on recess, so we should have easy access.  We hung around after the guided tour and once people cleared out, our guide let us in on the secret that you could sometimes get passes within the capitol building itself.  He directed to two different desks.  We got tickets for the Senate first and made our way down the long halls to the chamber.  There was no tour, you simply got to sit in a roped off section of the observation balcony and look at the chamber.  There was a guard there who made it extremely clear that NO pictures were to be allowed.  This disappointed me mightily.

The guard answered a lot of questions from visitors, and I learned that Senators are not allowed to use laptops in the chamber.  I had never realized this!  Its no wonder all the real work gets done somewhere else and people just talk to the cameras in this room.

 This is about the view we had from the observation balcony 

(obviously without the casket.  This image was found online).

We headed back to the main visitor atrium in search of a pass to the House chamber.  No one was at the desk.  We asked a guide, they directed to another desk.  No luck.  I was about to give up when we walked past  the entrance to that side of the building.  I asked the person taking tickets if we could come in because we had not been able to find anyone at the desk (and they clearly weren't busy).  We got in!  Persistence pays off in the end.  The House was similar to the Senate, also no pictures, no how.

(Also taken from the internet.  You can see the high tech screens on the upper back walls.  They looked like wallpaper to us when we visited).

We stopped in the gift shop so I could buy a post card with photos of the two chambers.  No go.  I was told that only CSPAN could film in there.  Not quite sure why this historical and central place in American politics is so 'forbidden'.