Washington DC Trip: Heading Home

Monday dawned, and it was time to leave our dear friend Tom and his east coast fun. Before dropping us off at the airport, we stopped by a local park to look for a geocache and some basketball courts. We couldn't find the geocache, but Ray and Tom found the basketball courts! They played some rousing one on one and had a blast!

The trip home was pretty uneventful. I highly recommend Washington DC to anyone. It's a great place with tons of educational, architectural, and entertaining things to do. It's even better when you have a tour guide named Tom Hanks. ;) Thanks for the good times, Tom!

Washington DC Trip: Sunday

Our last day in DC :(

It was cloudy and a bit chilly on Sunday morning. We found an awesome parking spot right in the middle of the three things we wanted to see! First, we walked back to the White House. Lots of success this time; we had a beautiful view. We meandered around and saw the front of the White House as well. It wasn't quite as grand, but we were much closer. We imagined the president sitting in there somewhere reading the paper in his underwear (we didn't "picture" it, just imagined the general idea of it!).

We then walked over to the Smithsonian's Natural History Museum. That place was a zoo! Kids everywhere! We still managed to see some neat meteors, gems, jewelry, animal skulls, and the like. We also saw the Hope Diamond. I actually wasn't that impressed. It was big, but I thought some of the other jewelry there was prettier. We also went through a gallery of nature photographs. They were amazing, stunning, whimsical, sad, endearing, everything you can imagine. It was probably my favorite part of the museum.

We ate lunch at the Nancy Hanks building. There is a tower there with bells at the top. The bells were donated to the US by Westminster Abbey. We were hoping to tour the bell tower, but couldn't because the bells were being rung for six hours for some special occasion.

We then left DC and went south to Mount Vernon, home of our first president, George Washington. Mount Vernon was definitely a highlight of the trip. The grounds are meticulously maintained with fantastic landscaping (I'm running out of adjectives to describe how great everything was!). The mansion is in excellent shape and we got to see the room and very bed that President Washington died in.

One cool thing I learned is that Martha was 4'11" - about the same height as me! One of her gowns was on display in the museum, and it looked like it would fit me! George, by the way, was taller than Ray at 6'2". That's quite a height difference!

Exhausted, we started our drive back to Raleigh. It rained almost the whole way, with major downpours during much of the drive. After much discussion (Tom), indecision (me), and irritation (Ray), we ate dinner at a Cracker Barrel on our way back. Tom almost left Ray at a gas station while the two argued over who was going to pay for gas! Lol! A very fun day.

Washington DC Trip: Saturday

Saturday morning saw Tom, Ray, and I getting up early, as usual! We rushed into DC to get in line for tickets to tour the Capitol building. It's free to tour, but you need to get there early to get tickets. Our tour time ended up being 11:40am, so we walked over to the Library of Congress to blow some time. The Library of Congress is a beautiful building (they all are in DC!), with elaborate quotes on the walls and carvings in the marble staircases. We got to peek into the main reading room, which is stuffed full of books. It was a very interesting place, I wish we had had more time to spend there.


We got back just in time to ask some fellow Wisconsinites to take our picture and head in for our Capitol tour. They are just about finished with their Visitor Center, so things were a little chaotic and we lost our group! We almost got escorted out by a security guard, but Tom sweet-talked him into trying to find our group. We never did find our group, but we snuck in with another group and learned some cool facts.

Next up was a drive out of DC and over to the Smithsonian's other Air and Space Museum. By this time, my feet were killing me from two days of walking on pavement went I'm not used to it. I let Ray and Tom wander around while I sat for a bit. I did get to see a Concorde airplane, a Blackbird, and the space shuttle Enterprise. Monsterous machines, all of them!

Saturday night was our relaxing night. We ordered some really good pizza to the hotel. The guys then watched some NBA finals while I worked on this blog and caught up on some reading. A very fun day!

Washington DC Trip: The White House Adventure

Ok, here is the promised “White House Adventure” story.

Ray, Tom, and I decided to walk past the White House on Friday evening. Upon arriving on the south side (which is actually the back of the White House), we saw that the road was blocked off. Getting closer, it became clear that we were not going to be allowed to walk past the White House. We hung around, wondering how long the sidewalk was going to be closed.

Finally, we decided to talk to a Capitol police officer who was obviously there to make sure nobody tried getting to where they weren't allowed. He was very nice and told us that a helicopter was going to be landing on the White House lawn and that was why the area was blocked off. He wasn't sure how long it was going to be, but didn't think it would be long.

We chatted with the police officer for awhile longer and decided to hang around and hopefully see the helicopter landing. There were a lot of people around, and some seemed to not notice that the area was blocked off (one spot in the road was left without barriers for vehicles leaving the secured area). Every couple of minutes, someone would try walking down that road instead of staying on the sidewalk, where they would have seen that it was blocked. They wouldn't get very far before a secret service officer would loudly blow his whistle and tell the person to get back.

After seeing this happen a couple of times, the three of us started trying to predict which people walking by would try to make it past the tough SS guy. We also tried to figure out how far down the road they would make it before the SS guy blew his whistle at them. We got quite a few laughs out of it and even had some Danes nearby laughing with us. Then, the Capitol police officer caught on to what we were doing, and he was laughing, too! Fun times!

A few people tried getting through the SS guy with White House passes, but he just yelled out, “I don't know what that means” or “That means nothing to me.” This guy was tough! Finally, some other secret service officers walked down the road. First, they showed their White House passes. No go. Then, they showed some other type of pass (we couldn't see what). The SS guy replied, “THAT I understand.” They got through :)

We never did get to walk past the White House that night. We got some awesome pictures on Sunday, though!

Washington DC trip: Friday

For anyone who doesn't know our friend, Tom, he is a "go, go, go" kind of guy. Vacations are no different as far as Tom's concerned. He had us up and showering a little after 6am on Friday. As soon as we were ready and fed, we headed to DC.

It was a 4-hour drive from Raleigh, and we made a pit-stop at Tom's favorite restaurant, McDonald's, for lunch. We parked our car near our hotel and took the metro train the last 20 miles into downtown DC. The timing was perfect! We parked the car, got our tickets, and stepped onto the train right before it left :)

Upon arriving in DC, we headed to the National Air and Space Museum. It was filled with tons of planes, space craft, and information about these things. We all touched a moon rock (photo to right is of Tom touching the moon rock)!

After seeing all of the sights at the Air and Space Museum, we decided to go visit Tom's state representative's office to pick up some tickets he had requested. We walked past the US Capitol Building on our way - it is beautiful!

We all felt a little intimidated inside the building where our representatives' offices are. It's a very quiet building and we had to go through security (just like we had to everywhere in Washington DC). We found the North Carolina office and, like the sign said, just walked in! The front desk guy was very nice, but we didn't get to see Tom's representative or anyone else "important" while we were there ;)

Next up was a completely unplanned trip to the US Botanic Garden. There were plants there from all over the world, from tropical ferns to cacti. There were also plenty of fragrant flowers in bloom (yes!).

By this time, we were all starving! We started heading in the general direction of the Lincoln Memorial, looking for food. We weren't coming up with much, so we finally settled on a place that looked a bit more expensive than we had hoped. The food was good, but the service was mediocre.

After dinner, we continued on. We decided that since we were close, we'd do a quick walk-by of the White House. On the way, we found awesome ice cream and a bunch of restaurants that looked much more like what we had hoped to eat at. Doesn't that figure?!

Ok, where to go from here...the White House adventure really deserves it's own post, so I think I'm going to blog about that separately. You'll have to wait!

After the White House adventure, we stopped by the Washington Memorial. We didn't go in, just saw the outside - very impressive. Our last stop for the evening was the Lincoln Memorial. That was awesome! It has amazing architecture and just looks majestic, especially after dark. The statue of Lincoln is huge! They also had the entire Gettysburg Address on one wall. It was very moving to read.

Exhausted, we found our train and headed to the hotel. I wore my pedometer and we walked over 21,000 steps on Friday! That's a new record for me while wearing the pedometer. It's good exercise walking around Washington DC :)

Washington DC Trip: Thursday

Ray and I left on Thursday afternoon for our trip to, first Raleigh, NC, and then Washington DC. Our flight had been delayed from 2:30pm to 4:30pm, so we had plenty of time Thursday morning to take it easy. It was really nice, it felt like we were retired!

We went for a nice, long, and leisurely walk in the morning. Then, we stopped at REI in Milwaukee on the way to the airport and picked up some pants for our upcoming backpacking trip. Yes!

Once at the airport, we ran into our friend Mustafa and chatted for awhile. Mustafa left for home and we found out that our flight had been delayed because of plane maintenance. While waiting for a new plane, we ran into our friend Jamie! It was pretty crazy.

We finally got to Raleigh at about 9pm (Tom's time). Tom took us out to a very late dinner and we got to see his place and listen to him play the piano.

Stay tuned for day two!

I Love Barbershop Quartets!

On Saturday night, Ray and I went to see the Fox Valley Aires Barbershop Chorus perform at Pathways Church. It was so much fun! They performed a play called "Love...Finally" about a bunch of rough men in a town where the women are scarce. A couple of women from a city where the men are scarce come to town and the men try to win them over by singing. It was really cute.

A lot of songs were sung by the entire choir of men, but there were some quartets stuck in for good measure. The quartets are my favorite. They also had a quartet, Main Street Station, perform apart from the musical. These guys are amazing! Definitely check out their Myspace page and listen to Love Potion 9. So cool!

Orthodontic Update April 2008

I wrote a little about my upcoming braces and surgery over at my Family and Finances blog in the past, and I've decided to move that topic over to this, my personal blog, for obvious reasons.

I went to the orthodontist today for a check-up on how the Hyrax is working. Dr. Olsen was very happy with my progress. He wants me to crank the appliance only once a week for the next four weeks. When I go in for my next appointment on April 30th, he'll see if I can stop cranking! I didn't ask how much longer the Hyrax would have to stay on after the cranking stops. He had originally told me six to eleven months, but I've been cranking it every four days instead of weekly up to this point.

I'll post another update next month!