Our quick trip to DC

So I was thinking about what I should blog about, and I realized that I hadn't updated the "adventures" category for a while. At least not since we went to DC. More than a month ago. Yeah. And that was sort of an adventure worth documenting.

Anyway, I think I'm going to knock out the trip in one fell swoop. Here goes.

We left on a Saturday morning, enjoying cold, cloudy weather through most of Ohio and Pennsylvania. Interestingly, it seemed like the landscape changed once we hit the Pennsylvania border. Instead of the incredibly straight roads surrounded by trees, suddenly there were miniature mountains (especially when we got off the freeway [which was not free], but even the Pittsburgh area was hilly). As we headed toward Gettysburg, something about the sunlight and mountains and canyons and trees and fields just sang to me, and it reminded me more of Cache Valley than anywhere else I had seen this side of the Mississippi. So I'd be sort of okay living there someday.

We finally reached Gettysburg, arriving at approximately 5:02 in the quaint little town. Conveniently, everything closed at 5:00. So we drove around instead of going in museums. (Come to think of it, last time we went to Gettysburg the museums just had boring guns and battle plans, so I don't feel like I missed much.)

A fence.

A memorial.

A pair of cute boys. One with very long hair.

 After hitting about 3 of the 15 sites on the self tour of Gettysburg, we got bored and drove to Maryland, enjoying Chick-Fil-A on our way into Baltimore. Once there, we stayed with our friends Craig and Roxy from our Inca Villa days. I'm pleased to report they're just as awesome and amazing now as they were then.
We spent all of Sunday and part of Monday morning hanging out with them before heading down to DC, first stopping by the temple.

The DC temple -- so big and beautiful.

After trying out all the nifty new features at the visitors' center, we hopped down to DC. Man, we felt way under dressed. Example: We had Jimmy Johns for lunch and everybody else who was in there was a young professional dressed, well, professionally. At a bland, cheap sandwich shop! Maybe we were just grumpy and frumpy, but everyone seemed kind of self-important. As Kevin noticed, everyone there probably thinks their work is pretty important, even if it's just getting coffee for some senator.

After walking around a bit and seeing the White House, we spent most of the rest of the day in the American History Museum. It's kind of funny how interested we were in the electricity section. As I looked at early batteries and motors with fascination and tried to remember Maxwell's equations and Faraday's law to explain how they worked, I realized that it probably was a good thing I majored in electrical engineering. (Especially interesting to me was the explanation of how fans work.) I felt my interest level completely collapse when I walked into the next room, which was about steam engines and other boring stuff. Guess it's good I didn't do mechanical engineering.

By the time we made it out of that museum, we had hit most every exhibit and were tired. So to the hotel we went.

The next morning, our first stop was the capitol building. The last time I went to DC was before 9/11, and I'm pretty sure we got to go in and take a tour. Naively I had assumed that we would get to do the same thing. As we were walking there though, we ran into someone who said "Oh, you have to talk to your state representative to do that." Way to plan ahead, us. Then we tried the visitors' center, but since we had packed lunches that was also a no-go. But hey, the outside was pretty.

Kevin and the Capitol

Kyra and the Capitol

Sleeping Joseph and the Capitol

  Down we went to the National Mall, walking past the Library of Congress and other beautiful buildings on our way down. After eating an early lunch (since no food was allowed here, either), we went into the Air and Space Museum. Which Kevin found cool. And I . . . you know, I should really find things like lunar modules cool. But I don't. I thought some of the airplane stuff was kind of cool.

He wanted to get out of the stroller any chance he could.

Next stop was the National Gallery. Which was so amazing that I didn't even take any pictures of it. But Dutch art rocks. Wow. I love how much they knew about light. And the mini David statue by Michelangelo was cool.

The next stop was the Natural History Museum. Considering that most animals, fossils, rocks, Neanderthals, the ocean, and insects pretty much top the list of things I don't care about (motorcycles and space stuff are up there too), I'm not sure why we went at all. But I actually really liked it. The displays were well done, the bones were cooler than I give them credit for, and they included enough aesthetically pleasing exhibits that I sort of appreciated natural history. Especially the gems. I was a fan of the Hope diamond.

And the butterflies! On Tuesdays you could go into the butterfly garden for free, and it was incredible!

We didn't let him step on any. We like butterflies better than praying mantises.

After we left, we raced through the rest of the Mall. Hurried past the Washington Monument. Spent a few minutes at the Korean and Vietnam war memorials. Took an elevator to see President Lincoln up close at his memorial (there was no way we were taking the stroller up all those stairs). Spent a few minutes at the MLK memorial. Started walking toward the Jefferson memorial before realizing it was in the absolute middle of nowhere and Joseph was cold and cranky and it was threatening to rain so we just found the nearest Metro station. And I think by then we had sort of had our fill of DC anyway. I know there's a ton we didn't hit, but we hit what we were most interested in, which I guess was the Smithsonians.

And then the next morning we headed home, battling Snowstorm Saturn til we hit Pennsylvania so Kevin could spend the rest of spring break studying for his hundreds of tests the next week. There were parts that were sort of scary, but it definitely wasn't the worst snow two Utah kids have seen. On the bright side, the roads were basically empty.

So now you know how we like to do vacations: Hit as much free stuff as fast as possible, except for when we're looking at the original battery and Dutch art.