One for DC

Happy Monday everyone!  This week not only do I have my standard "weekend" of Sunday and Monday, but I also had off on Friday and Saturday because it was our anniversary!  I can hardly believe that we have been married for an entire year.  It feels like no time at all and forever all at the same time.  To celebrate we went to one of our favorite vacation sites -- Washington DC.

The actual space suit worn by Yuri Gagarin, first man in space, on display at the Smithsonian

 

Rather than paying an arm and a leg to stay in the city, we found an inexpensive hotel room in Alexandria and took the metro into the city on Saturday.  Alexandria is a lovely historic town on the Patomic and is very walking friendly.  One of the things Chris and I have found we like to do on vacation is to park the car once we arrive and not use it again until we are heading home.  The long walks are great exercise and allow us to spend more time talking and people watching, which is always fun.  We ate some truly amazing food, both at a surprisingly authentic Greek restaurant and at my new favorite, Bilbo Baggins Global Restaurant.

Sunday morning we decided to find a place for brunch and Google led us to this charming find.  The entire place is Hobbit themed, though not after the new film, but after the old cartoon I have dim memories of watching as a child.  The food was spectacular and we got to play Lord of the Rings trivia while we waited.

Saturday was our day in DC and we tried to cram in as much site seeing as we could.  We probably could have fit in a few more museums, but we had so much fun at the International Spy Museum that we did not move on until after noon.

The only part of the museum I risked photographing -- crawling through duct work!

We saw the ground floor of the American Indian Museum, everything we could find in the Air and Space Museum, the Library of Congress, and all of the American History Museum that was not closed for renovation.  Our mad dash walk took us past the Capital building, and we saw the outside of the Supreme Court, which is actually being renovated and so is hidden by a cloth barrier with a picture of the building.

He traveled all this way to see the Supreme Court and all he got was a photo and some stairs.

And of course I squeezed in knitting at every chance, making a bit of progress on my Camp Loopy 3 project (Theresa Gregorio's To the Ground).

All in all it was a wonderful trip.  We got up close and personal with a lot of history without feeling pressured to absorb it all lest we never return, which is how I like my vacations.  Now I have to go back to real life and unpack the rest of this apartment.  Or I could just sit here and knit while catching up on podcasts.  It really is one or the other.