Library of Congress

I love libraries. And today, I got to go to the most amazing library...

So it's beautiful and ya, ya, ya...

Then there's the books!

Here's what you see on the tour. ***

But once I got a library card (yep, I did)

then I got to go inside. And touch the books. Only the reference books are available to go pick out.

Everything else must be requested to be brought to a reading room.

Since our family has had several Library of Congress books sent to our local library through interlibrary loan, we thought it would be fun to request one of those same books so that we could touch the same book that we had in California (http://grubbforlife.blogspot.com/2011/05/zoology-fast.html?m=0) here in DC. However, only the person with the card can be in the reader room where you get to request books. So we resolved that I would request one of the books and go take a photo of myself with the book. Just to enter the reading room, I had to check all of my stuff in the cloakroom and only go in with my phone. I could have also had a laptop or a notepad, but that's it. 

(Kids hanging with Grandma in Young Readers room - the only place anyone under 16 can touch books.)

The book I requested was in a different building and to have it transferred over would take an hour and a half so I elected to request it to be sent to the reading room in that particular building. And then I took a tunnel under the street to get to it. When I got to the reading room, the gentleman at the desk was interested in why I had requested the book and ended up saying that the kids could come take a photo with the book because it was not in the main library's reading room in the Jefferson building but in an alternate reading room in the Adams building which did not have the same complicated security. 

My family was excited to reconnect with our science book from long ago. (:

*** that photo above of what you see on the tour... if you look carefully at the bookshelves in the third-floor windows, the red and green books seen are not actually books but props for the movie National Treasure.

Did I mention that we watched the movie the first night we were in DC? So fun. It made our entire trip our kids seeking out places they had seen the movie. The stage for this was set when we were in Philadelphia at Independence Hall and the park ranger was telling us about how they filmed the scene in the belltower there but Nicolas Cage was not allowed to run across the roof for the movie. They had to do that on a separate set. Anyway, fun stuff.