National Zoo and Transportation

We are going to the National Zoo while we are in Washington, D.C. We had to look online at the National Zoo's website. On the website we figured out that we could go for free. We can go from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. in September and October. While we were looking at the website, I was looking at some of the pictures of the animals. There were pictures of lions, and other cool animals. I read that there is a spider exhibit. I want to go there during my trip.

One of the cool things I was reading was about feeding a giant octopus and a talk about spiders. I was wondering how they are going to feed a giant octopus without being eaten.

We are using public transportation while we are in Washington, D.C. The zoo's webpage said that we can get to the zoo using the MetroBus (L1, L2, and L4) and the MetroRail (Red Line).

We then went to the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority web page. Then we were hunting for information on how to get from our friend's house in Woodbridge to Washington, D.C. It was complicated trying to figure it all out. We tried to use the Metro's Trip Planner to figure it out, and that didn't really work. We did find information about the SmartTrip card, and how much fares cost. We tried to do the math to figure out which fare card would be best. We found out that the 7 day Fast Pass is $39.00, or we could get a get a regular SmartTrip card, that we could put money on for our trips - and pay for each trip. We decided we couldn't make a decision on which one to buy yet because we didn't know how many days (or which days!) we were going to be in D.C. We want to visit other places in the area too.

The next step that we need to do is figure out what activities we want to do, and then figure out which days we are going to do them. That way we will know how many days we need to get a rail pass for. It will be a little hard to make a solid plan because we don't know if we are going to get to go to the White House or not yet, but we can make it so that we can swap days around to make the plan work.