Obscure Monuments Tour part 4--The end of the Road

After clearing FDR we came back to our main purpose of obscure monuments. One of the smallest monuments in the area is the Japanese Pagoda monument. Given in 1957, it commemorates the treaty signed by the US and Japan in 1854. It is undoubtedly at home among the cherry blossoms in the spring. This particular monument gave me a great perspective of the Jefferson Memorial as well.

This layout is based on a CM sketch. I'm not really sure why I did this one. Usually, I only save the Virtual Crops or the Weekend Challenges for advisors but it doesn't seem to have been in either of those. Still, the layout worked as I wanted it to. I chose a lot of pink scraps to create the borders on the edges. That goes back to my Cherry Blossom theme. I could even pull in one of the decorative mats from the Eastern National scrapbook pack.

Continuing on around the Tidal Basin, we crossed a bridge with decorative troughs. Though it looks much older, it was installed in the late 1980s. The image is "Jack Fish" who was the Park Superintendent and was about to retire. The staff decided to immortalize him on the bridge. Our tour continued on and headed to the George Mason Memorial (skipping the Jefferson Memorial). George Mason was the author of the Virginia Declaration of Rights, which served as an inspiration to Thomas Jefferson while drafting the Declaration of Independence, so it's appropriately placed. In addition to the collonade and his statue there is a lovely garden (well, lovely in the summer).

This layout is based on a CM Virtual Crop sketch. I rather liked this one as it was created all from one sheet of double-sided paper. I added some laser-cut borders to the bottom. All of this is from the Homestead collection from CM.

We had an option to follow the Ranger to one more stop--East Potomac Park. Having no other plans, I went along. It is a short walk from the Mason Memorial. It's a bit of a forgotten park and only has a few benches and a small bit of grass. This urn was given to us by Cuba (back when we were talking to them). The monument originally stood in Cuba to honor the American deaths aboard the USS Maine preceding the Spanish–American War in 1898. The Ranger told us that this monument had been located elsewhere on the Tidal Basin and was subsequently put into storage. It was rediscovered in the 1990s and placed in this park.

I used another CM Virtual Crop Sketch (October #3). There was a hint of fall color in the photos so I went back to the Hello Autumn. That was a good choice for another reason-I'd used it so much that I had a lot of scraps and this is one of those layouts that will use up your scraps! The border strip hides any slight inconsistencies in the lengths of the bottom row.