Growing up in the Washington, D.C., area meant taking trips to experience everything the city has to offer, from the Smithsonian museums and the Washington Monument, to the mint and the Capitol.
Going through a stack of old tickets for my last post, I came across some other items like this:
It’s a pass to sit in the gallery of the Senate from a day in the summer of 1993, when my grandmother took my siblings and I to see the confirmation hearing for Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
For those who don’t know, if you want to watch the excitement in the Senate or the House, you can go to the office of your senator or representative and get one of these passes. Of course, they don’t really check if you live in their district. This can lead to some fun.
During my senior year of high school, our entire class went to Capitol Hill for a field trip. I don’t remember having any actual assignment other than attending either a House or Senate session. The rest of the day was up to us. So we invented a little game called “How Many Passes Can You Get?”
It went something like this:
-Go to one of the House office buildings and walk into any open office
-Be sure to note the state listed outside the door
-Pretend to be from that state — the more obscure the town you can pull, the better
-Bonus points for an accent
-Repeat as much as possible
I hope kids still do this.
Another piece of my childhood I stumbled across was a memento from our trip to the Indianapolis Motor Speedway. We were in Indiana for a family reunion and visited the Indy 500 venue, which included a pretty awesome cruise around the track itself in a bus:
Finally, the ticket from my time seeing the Dead Sea Scrolls. On the morning of my brother’s wedding, we had some time to kill, and with this museum near our hotel, a few family members went to check out the exhibit. The group included my cousin, Lauren, who completely followed through on a joke we made in the gift shop by making me this t-shirt:
Definitely the most exclusive souvenir I have.