However, we continued on and arrived together at the visitor's center and security station. Everyone one of our scouts set off the alarm with their belt loops and had to be scanned with the wands. After the first two, they waved all the boys, five bears and one weeblo, to one side and scanned them at once. We were glad to find a coat check so we did not have to walk around with our them. The crew was anxious to get moving to see the real part of the trip, so we wandered our way down to the ticket area where Karl had 30 tickets reserved for the tour. The boys and girls had fun looking at the very large bronze sautes of King Kamehameha I and Sachawa near the ticket counter.
Anton and Isabella were very excited to be able to tell their friends how to pronounce Kamehameha. Incidentally, we discovered later, this statue is the heaviest of all the bronze statues and must stay in this location because it is resting over a massive support structure for the building. It is the only spot they were not worried about it crashing through the floor. The statuary was part of a program with the Capitol in which each state contributed two statues of either bronze or marble for decorating the spaces. Our tour guide had a map of the locations of each state's contributions so she could point them out the visitor's home state's contribution. She also explained the statues were being swapped out all the time as state's changed or updated their representative statues.
