Day 4!

Hello everyone!

This post will be on Day 4. I am sorry that I’m so far behind on the updates. It has been a busy the last few days.

Day 4:

We got up early to check out of our hotel. We then went to the National History Day check-in on the campus of Maryland University. We checked in and received our competition times and we got free stuff. (Always good!) I received five magazines on the American Civil War. Our Grandma bought us National History Day jackets and t-shirts. After that, we decided to go to Fort Stevens, a small gun emplacement in the middle of urban Washington D.C. We did not realize that we were there until we were in the parking lot. (It was not the best part of town) We were expecting a full blown fort and a visitors center, (It was the National Park Service.) but what we found was quite different. It was a small grass field, with a wall around it. Two cannons were positioned along the side of the wall. We found a large plaque which said that the spot where we stood was the place where the only sitting President who has ever come under direct fire from an enemy combatant. Abraham Lincoln had stood there 151 years before. The walls, while looking like wood, were actually concrete. It was all very cool. After staying there for about half an hour, we returned to our hotel. We stayed there for about an hour before proceeding to the Opening Ceremonies of National History Day. One of the cool things about NHD is that each state (And territory) has its own button. Each student gets there state’s buttons and then tries to trade them for all of the other state buttons. It is a lot of fun. I currently have 46 of 56 buttons. We traded buttons for an hour before the opening ceremonies. We listened to the host of NPR’s “Wait wait, don’t tell me” game show, a constitutional historian. We then listened to the sponsor of NHD and then the we got ready to go to our hotel. It was an awesome night.

(I will add pictures when I get some from Dad.)

Thanks for reading!

JM