West Wing Tour

On Saturday night, we got to go on a West Wing tour.  It's one of the perks Joe gets for his short 6 month stint working for the office of the President.  We walked through two different security posts and through an metal detector with our cameras and wallets X-rayed.  It was raining so we hustled over to the basement entrance of the White House.

You walk in and there's a guard behind a desk who checked the badges we received for the tour.  We walked down some stairs to see the door of the Situation Room.  It's a normal size wooden door but has a peep-hole.  It's not like you're opening the door during a meeting unless you see who's on the other side.  There were numerous action shots of President Obama in frames all along the walls.  There are also old paintings of special events through the halls as well like Lincoln signing the Emancipation Proclamation.

Next past another guard post, we made our way out onto the patio of the Rose Garden.

This is the walkway right next to the Cabinet room and at the far end is the Oval Office.  Here's a shot looking into the windows of the Cabinet room and of course my daughter is all smiles.

So right at the end of the walkway is where President Obama has his smoke every so often I bet.  It was cool just thinking about all the history of that patio.  I mean Presidents had to be out there clearing their minds before big decisions in the history of the nation.  Just amazing when you think about it.  We saw a guard all in black packing some serious fire power walking through the garden as we were about to leave.

So we went back inside for the best part of the tour, actually peeking in through an open door at both the Cabinet Room, the Roosevelt Room and Oval Office.  The Cabinet Room and Roosevelt Room each have a chair just for the President.  It's almost identical to the other chairs in the room except it has a taller back and of course is at the center of the table.  There was guard right outside the Oval Office who actually knew some information about the rooms, etc.

She told us about the Roosevelt Room which has Franklin's Nobel Prize in it on the wall and Teddy's Congressional Medal of Honor.  It also has all the military branch flags with ribbons signifying each action they were part of.  Even the Coast Guard has a flag(a shout out to my Jeff and Elizabeth in Seattle).  It has a secure video conference equipment and cool fake skylight in the ceiling.

Obviously, the most interesting was the Oval Office.  We found out that President Obama is using the Resolute desk as in the movie National Treasure: Book of Secrets.  It's looks really cool in real life with all the carving on it.  He just got a pen holder given to him created from the hull of the HMS Resolute's sister ship.  He had pictures of his family and wife on a little table behind the desk.  The Oval Office has this cool stone carving of the Presidential symbol on the middle part of the ceiling.  He has two busts, one is Lincoln and one is MLK.  The guard said this was the first time a civilian's sculpture has been in the Oval Office.

We just marveled at it for awhile and easily spent 20 minutes just chatting with guard and asking questions.  Just trying to make a mental picture of the place.

We walked out through the actual White House lobby to the outside.

Our last stop of the tour was the Press Briefing room.  It's quite small overall as compared when you see it on TV.  It only has 35 chairs.

We hung out and got some fun pictures in here.

I'm not a crook. Okay so maybe I was only one goofing around.  What ya gonna do!

Overall, we spent an hour for the tour.  A co-worker of Amber's had a nice camera so I hope to get a bunch of high quality shots from him as these were all camera phone shots.

Elena even had fun and was not bored.  I guess living here isn't bad all the time.