Washington DC Trip – July 2011

At the end of July Daniel and I went on our annual “couple trip” without the kids.  I was a little bit nervous for this one because Cynthia was still nursing, but I just pumped lots of milk for while we were gone, and took a pump to DC with us.  Everything went fine, thanks to my expert parents who were watching the kids.  It was going to be only my mom who stayed with them, but the day after we left my dad flew down also, as a surprise to the kids.  It was nice to know that they were in such good hands, so I could relax and enjoy the time away with Daniel.

We flew into Baltimore, Maryland, and actually spent the first night there before going to Washington, DC the next day.  Neither of us had been to Baltimore before, and we wanted to be able to spend some time there.

After we dropped our stuff off at our hotel we walked down to Camden Yards, where the Orioles play.  It is a really cool stadium.  We walked around, posed by the Babe Ruth statue, and then found the house where Babe Ruth was born.  

After that we walked down to Baltimore’s Inner Harbor.  I love harbors.  It reminded me of Boston a little bit.  I spotted an H&M store (I went to one years ago – Ollie was a baby – when we had a sister trip in Virginia and I’ve always wanted to go back), so I went in and quick as lightning bought a shirt while Daniel sat outside and relaxed and took this picture:

Then we did some more walking around the harbor:

We walked to Obrycki’s Crab House for dinner to try some of their famous crabs.  While we were walking there, we noticed we were maybe entering a questionable area of Baltimore and we weren’t sure how much further the restaurant was, so we called a cab and he took us the rest of the way.  We asked him which areas of Baltimore we should be staying away from, and he gave us good advice on which streets to take when we were walking back to our hotel after dinner. 

I am not much of a seafood person but I decided to be brave and try the whole crab experience.  It was fun, and I’m glad I did.  The crab tasted less fishy than I had expected.  The kids loved seeing pictures of us with our bibs and our crab-pounding mallets.

After dinner we walked back to Inner Harbor, and then back to our hotel.  We loved Baltimore.

The next morning after breakfast we took a bus down to the train station.  We had bought Amtrak tickets to get from Baltimore to Washington, DC.  It was actually really fun taking the train.  I liked it.  We started getting wild ideas about taking a train trip with our kids one day.

Once we got to Union Station in DC, we walked to our hotel and dropped off our bags.  Then we walked up to Capitol Hill.  It was very hot and muggy.  We found a little pizza place for lunch, and then went over to the Capitol for a tour.  It was a good tour - interesting and informative.

Then we went to the Library of Congress and did another tour.  This building is so amazing!

That night we did a walking tour of the monuments and memorials in the National Mall.  It was nice to do it at night, when it wasn’t so hot. We saw:

The Washington Monument:

The White House (from a distance)

While we were standing around taking pictures and also listening to the tour guide talk about the Washington Monument, we noticed a family standing nearby. The dad was dressed normally, the mom had both a modest shirt and shorts (rare among the women tourists), and they had a bunch of little kids. Daniel said, “for sure that family is Mormon.”  I walked over and struck up a conversation with the lady, asking her how old her baby was. She asked if we had kids, and when I told her we had six, she mentioned that her husband was from Utah. I told her that we were originally from Utah, and then we both just looked at each other and laughed. We talked with them a lot during the rest of the tour – I love the instant connection the church can create with people.

Next up was the National World War II Memorial.

We also saw the Vietnam War Veteran’s Memorial, which is amazing, but I guess we didn’t take a picture of that.  It was getting dark, as you can see from the pictures of the Lincoln Memorial. 

After the tour we took a taxi to go find somewhere to eat dinner.  We were so tired and sore from walking all day.  We got dropped off on Capitol Hill, and decided to eat at Ted’s Bulletin, a restaurant I had seen on the Rockstar Diaries blog (she is a DC expert, after all).  It was a really cool restaurant, and I felt like ordering everything on the menu.  Maybe it was just because we were so worn out and so hungry, but it was one of my favorite meals of the trip.  Writing about it is making me want to go back. 

When we left the restaurant it was after eleven, but we managed to survive the long walk back to our hotel. We crossed over the Capitol building grounds on our way. 

Here is the view of the Capitol from our hotel room the next morning.  It was weird because this was the end of July, and all the budget talks were going on right there.

Our second day in DC we walked back down to the National Mall to see some of the Smithsonian museums.  We started out at the U.S. Botanic Garden. 

And then the National Museum of the American Indian.  This one was really interesting.  You really could spend days and days going through the Smithsonian museums;  there is so much to see and learn.

My favorite was the Air and Space Museum.  We decided to do a guided tour of that one;  we knew that if we didn’t, we would waste time just wandering around, and not know where to focus our time.  I’m so glad we did the tour!  Our guide was really knowledgeable, and had a lot of great stories and insights about different exhibits in the museum.  The tour was supposed to last about 90 minutes, and ours ended up being over 3 hours and we didn’t even care (which shows how interesting it was).  It’s funny how much you can actually learn at a museum when you don’t have kids there with you.

At one point in the tour, our guide noticed that Al Worden (a pilot for the Apollo 15 moon mission back in 1971) was sitting at a table signing books (he wrote one about his experiences on the moon).  He stopped the tour so we could go meet him.  Our kids couldn’t believe it when we told them we shook the hand of someone who has been on the moon. 

That evening we went to a baseball game at Nationals Park (we did that in Boston and Philadelphia, and have decided it’s a fun tradition for our trips – we’re trying to see how many baseball stadiums we can go to). 

When the game was over we walked back to our hotel, stopping at a Mexican restaurant for a late dinner on our way.

The next day we went to the National Zoo.  It’s part of the Smithsonian Institution, so admission is free – it felt funny just walking right into a zoo. 

My favorite thing at the zoo was seeing the gorillas.  There was a dad gorilla playing around with his little baby gorilla, and it was about the funniest and cutest thing I have ever seen at a zoo.  We stayed there for a long time, just watching them wrestle and play.  The dad was being so wild – he would wrestle and hug the baby, and then fling it over in the corner of his little loft area, or push him off onto the ground.  The baby kept running away and hiding, and then the dad would sit there and pout and make really sad faces until the baby would come back for more.  The cutest part was once when it ran across the room and then looked back at the dad and beat his chest really hard, just like grown-up gorillas do. 

After the zoo we walked down to the Potomac River to a little boathouse and rented a canoe.  We paddled up the river for awhile, until we got a good view of the Lincoln Memorial and the Washington Monument.  Then we paddled around a little island, and back to the boathouse. 

Later that evening we walked over to the White House. 

The next day was our last day in DC, but we still fit in a lot.  First we took the Metro across the river to the Arlington National Cemetery.  We got tickets for the tourmobile, because by this point we were pretty tired from walking everywhere. 

The tomb of the unknown soldier:

Looking back across the river into DC:

After that we went to the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History.  We took a lot of pictures of things we knew our kids would love (maybe we were missing them a little). 

Then we went to Ford’s Theatre, where President Lincoln was shot.  The house on the right is where they took him afterward;  he died there. 

We had wanted to go up to the top of the Washington Monument, but all the tickets were sold out.  Someone had told us that the old post office clock tower also had great views of the city, and tickets are free.  That was the last thing we did before we left for the airport.  It was fun looking down on the city and seeing all the places we had been.  I think maybe I should have done that when we first got there, because the whole time we were in DC I was pretty turned around about where things were (it always makes me laugh, because when we go on our trips, by the end of the first day Daniel pretty much has the whole map of the city engrained in his head, and he knows where everything is, whereas even by the end of our trips I am still turning the wrong direction when we step out of our hotel to go anywhere.  I am not intuitive about directions). 

At the Metro station, getting ready to go back to the hotel.  Then we ran to Union Station to catch our train back to the Baltimore Airport. 

We flew back to Austin and my dad picked us up from the airport.  It was good to be home and back with the kids.  I woke Cynthia up right away to nurse her.  She kept patting my face the whole time, and saying “mama, mama.”  I was relieved that she still remembered me and loved me.  At the beginning of the trip, of course I had been nervous that things weren’t going to go well, and that she’d be sad the whole time.  By the second day, though, I was nervous instead that she was too happy without us – I was talking to Tristan on the phone, and I asked him how Cindy was doing, and if she was sad or not.  He replied (trying to be helpful, I’m sure), “Oh, she’s not even a little bit sad, Mom!  She loves Grandma Orva so much, I don’t even think she remembers you at all!”  I have to admit that panicked me a little bit.  But really, it was wonderful how smoothly everything went. 

Thanks so much to my parents for making our trip possible!