Washington D.C. to London!

Good evening from London! It's time to recap the last 24 hours which have been... well... eventful! I woke up yesterday morning, and we headed out of the hotel only to find that instead of boarding a bus to take us to our appointments around Washington, we had to ride around in this:

We affectionately nicknamed this "the hummerlimo" and were chauffeured expertly around D.C. despite several stops to have the vehicle swept by the Secret Service and explosive sniffing dogs. It was definitely traveling in style, despite that fact that we packed 22 people into that limo. We got an awful lot of people waving, smiling, and taking pictures as we drove around. It was pretty fun, made
us all feel rather important.
Our first stop of the day was at the White House to meet with President Obama's Chief Technology Officer Aneesh Chopra in the conference center. He was a very warm and gave us a 15 minute talk about what he does and how he is working with the president to develop a system to improve Emergency personnel response times to vehicle accidents. I was particularly interested in this subject because of my involvement in the Automotive industry. Based on the conversation with him, I would not be surprised if we see an OnStar like system become standard on all vehicles sometime in the near future. The purpose of this being to immediately alert emergency services of your location and the condition of your vehicle upon any sort of collision.
After pausing for a team picture in front of the White House, we headed up to Capitol Hill to meet with the Caucus on Career and Technical Education. Here I had the privilege to briefly share about my past competition experiences, and also to share my thoughts on the importance of Career Technical Education at the High School and Post-Secondary level.
After this, we made two more stops, one at the Department of Education and one at the U.S. Senate.

Our last stop of the day was a team photo in front of the U.S. Capitol.

Then it was off to the airport for a 7 hour flight over to London. We arrived safely and had a fairly uneventful (albeit long) ride to our hotel. We did a little exploring this evening, but most of the day has been spent trying to recover from jet lag and get everything set for the next week. Tomorrow we will be going on the London Excursion which is a bus tour, cruise on the Thames river, and a ride in the London Eye, the largest Ferris wheel in the world (so I'm told). I'll do my best to get some good photos.

That's all for now!

-Daniel