Scammed in DC

I'm not going to lie.  We saw some great things in DC, but it's a bit tainted for us, because of being scammed out of a couple hundred dollars.  It could have been worse, but it could have also been a lot better.  I'll preface by saying that I planned the NY portion of our trip first.  My friend had recommended a City Pass to save money on a bunch of entries, and it worked beautifully.  I thought we could do something similar in DC.  All I really wanted was the bus to take us around to see all the sights, and possibly bundle it with something else.  I looked it up and there were basically 2 identical websites.  One was for the Big Bus and another was the same thing but called Sightseeing Pass.  I don't remember why I went for one over the other, but I paid for it, downloaded the app, and loaded all 6 tickets that had our QR codes on them.  I even planned the whole day based on the map of the stops on the website.  This was back in February, but I double checked everything on the website right before we left on our trip to make sure I wasn't missing anything, and to make final reservations to some of the museums.  I also double checked where we needed to go and when to hop onto the bus.  We get to the location only to find out the bus doesn't exist.  We click on the link in the email conformation and it sends you to a message saying they've closed shop and no tickets purchased can be used.  I called the customer service number and it's a call center in India saying they can credit us $100 if we give them our credit card information.  Ya no.  That's not going to happen.  Gratefully, I purchased the tickets through PayPal, so they didn't have my credit card information, but it still totally stunk. We now had no way to travel around to the sites and it was already 90 degrees in 90% humidity at 9 in the morning.  It was a bit of a nightmare.  After being just paralyzed by the predicament for about a half hour we decided to suck it up and just trying walking to some of the locations. We walked to the Washington Monument out past the World War II Memorial to the Lincoln Memorial and then all the way back past the White House to the Natural History Museum. The kids were total troopers and didn't complain.  I think they just knew there was nothing we could do about it. This was even after we had walked over a mile to the subway station to get downtown.  We were able to take a bus to the National Library of Congress, but by the end of the day we had walked 10 miles in nasty, humid heat.  Needless to say, we were all exhausted by the time we got back to our hotel that evening.

The National Archives was pretty cool.  We loved seeing the Constitution, Bill of Rights, and a copy of the Magna Carta.

The National Library of Congress was also pretty cool.  The boys did a scavenger hunt that they liked.

The best part was probably sitting down in air conditioning for dinner.  We ate right off capital hill, and the kids loved it.  The food really good - thank goodness. Our reserves were rather low at this point.