Yesterday Andrew and I went with both our sets of parents to the National Cathedral in DC. Dad, Andrew and I went on a special tour where you get to climb pretty high up in the crossing tower [the big one in the middle of the church, not the two at the west/front end]. This is the tower with the two sets of bells. Apparently this is not a normal tour. The weather was pretty good, little windy though and cold when you were up in the parts of the tower that are basically open air.
There were two sets of bells, one which are rung mechanically w/ a hammer type thing, but where the 'tune' is played by someone sitting at what resembles an organ. So someone is actually pounding at the keys to make the bells ring.
The second type are huge bells that have long ropes attached that people pull in different ways to make music. Apparently this type of ringing is centuries old. We got to hear both which was kinda neat. I would have enjoyed a little more of an 'architectural' tour that taught us about the tower construction and the building, and where we would have gotten to go higher [we really only went about half way up the tower] but it was still a cool tour.
My dad has a former student that works there that is going to set up a tour for us kinda behind the scenes, where we got to go through special doors and up stairs that regular people don't- now this is my type of tour! Looking forward to when that happens. This place is full of cool carved doors that are locked and carved spiral stone stairs that look like they go to cool places....
Afterward we all went to lunch in Georgetown which was nice too. It was great to see each of our parents all at once. We are amazingly lucky that we each have parents we totally get along with, and that our spouse gets along with too.
