"Take the FREE US Capitol Building Tour" Top 5 Page for this destination U.S. Capitol Building Tip by Ewingjr98

Favorite thing: Tickets for the one-hour guided tours of the Capitol are available for free at the Capitol Visitor's Center. Show up in the summer or on a busy weekend, and you might wait hours for your tour; luckily you can check out the brand new Exhibition Hall while you wait. Even better, try coming on a weekday in the early fall, and you might not wait more than a minute or two.

Guided tours will gather the group right next to the ticket lines, then move you into one of the Orientation Theaters in the Capitol Visitor Center. There your tour will start with a 13 minute movie called “Out of Many, One.”

After the video, you will go up the stairs to the back of the theater and meet your guide. The tour begins in the Crypt, the location which was originally intended for Washington's Tomb. Today the crypt is used mainly as a museum, and it houses several statues from the National Statuary Collection.

The second stop in the tour is upstairs in the Rotunda itself. This is where deceased Presidents lie in state. This is also home to the famous painting called the Apotheosis of Washington, which depicts Washington becoming a God. The room has several famous paintings including one called the Declaration of Independence, which is on the two dollar bill. The room also contains several statures from the National Statuary Collection including Washington, Andrew Jackson, Ronald Reagan, and Dwight Eisenhower.

Finally the last stop on the short tour is the National Statuary Hall or the Old Hall of the House, which was the original chamber of the House of Representatives. Today it houses the majority of the National Statuary Collection, and it is marked by several plaques denoting where several Presidents sat when they were still in Congress.