We did the free walking tour of the Capitol buildi...

We did the free walking tour of the Capitol building today. I had made an advance reservation, and I'm glad I did, because the line for walk-ins was at least an hour long. We walked right in to our tour.

The security staff is, as others have noted, rude. There's just nothing you can do about that. Don't bring anything you care about. My neighbor's expensive sunscreen ended up in the trash. I had an apple in my purse that they forced me to eat before entering the building. It wasn't dangerous, sharp, or likely to spill. It was an apple.

The experience consists of a 15-minute introductory movie (which was actually quite good) and then a "45-minute walking tour." The walking tour shows you two rooms - the Rotunda and the Statuary Hall. That's it. We could not believe how short and uninformative it was.

It was impossible to hear and understand our tour guide's commentary, even though they gave us headsets that were designed to help in that regard. There were at least 20 tour groups in the Rotunda at once, and our headsets picked up the commentary of all the guides at the same time.

All in all, I was disappointed. The Rotunda is beautiful, and the introductory film was nice, but neither was worth what we had to go through to see them.