The Rest of the Story

I never really finished my Washington, DC story. The rest of the week, Diane and I spent roaming the town.

Diane and Michael outside the National Archives Building

Thursday morning, Diane and I had a tour of the capitol building and then we met up with our aunt, uncle, and cousin at the Native American history Smithsonian museum for lunch and then wandered through some of the exhibits there and then to the American History Museum. While I was off in all of my meetings, Diane had been wandering on her own and found out that some building (the post office?) had a bell tower that they practiced playing the bells on Thursday evenings so we thought we should hang around town to catch the bells. We would have walked to all the monuments but it was really windy and really cold so we put that off again. We wandered around hitting the Hirschorn, the Smithsonian castle, and the Air and Space Museum, but then everything closed. We decided to hunt down a pizza place that we heard was really good called We the Pizza, but as we were walking toward it, we realized we would be walking away from the bell tower place, we thought we would just eat and then walk back, but after getting halfway there, we decided we were tired of walking and just ate the pizza and found the closest metro stop to get back to the hotel.  We mapped out our walking that day and figured we had walked nine miles.

Friday, Diane and I had a chocolate tour of Georgetown with a Groupon Diane had found before we left. It was a little bit of history mixed in with a walking tour to six different places that let us sample their chocolate. We started at the Old Stone House to meet up and then walked to Sprinkles Cupcakes for a chocolate cupcake, then Godiva for a bit of chocolate, then Thomas Sweet for chocolate bobka, then Fleurir (a really cute little shop) for an amazing piece of chocolate caramel, then Dean and Deluca's for a pretty little piece of screen printed cherry chocolate, and finally Pie Sisters for a mini-chocolate pecan pie bite. All really good. Since we were "close" we decided today would be the day to see all of the monuments--also because it was the last day we were there and could see the monuments. We walked from Georgetown along the river to the Lincoln memorial followed by: National World War Two, Korean War, Vietnam War, Martin Luther King Jr., FDR, and Jefferson. We kept running into a group of high school students that would have been nice to avoid. We then walked to the closest metro stop and went back to the hotel. It was another nine mile day.

Fancy chocolate from Dean and Delucca

Our fancy lunch we packed for our trip to Georgetown. We travel in style. Yes, one of the sandwiches is wrapped in a barf bag from the plane.

Sign on the way to the Jefferson Memorial right next to the water. Apparently walking on water is not allowed here.

Saturday we stuck around the hotel until checkout time, mostly just trying to stuff everything in our bags (it had fit coming out, but seemed to have expanded once we had gotten there) and watching TV. We still had a couple of hours, not long enough to really go see or do anything else and we had all of our bags, so we just camped out at the airport. I assumed the DC airport would have been bigger. I guess it is pretty big, but it's compartmentalized with different security checkpoints for each terminal so you couldn't really go back and forth to each one. We would have hung out with Michael at the airport but he was flying on a different airline so he was in a different terminal.

Another stylish lunch with our second use of the barf bag for the sandwich we made from a jar of PB we brought from home and jam packets from the breakfast bar.

Overall, it was a great experience. The weather was cold and not very tourist friendly until Saturday morning, but it was doable. I'd like to go back to DC sometime and just be a tourist, but definitely with better weather.