This little vacation was exactly what I needed right now :) Just to be able to spend some time as a couple before our lives get more chaotic when there's two little ones at home!
Day 1
The first day we went and visited the Washington D.C temple and did a session there. It was such a beautiful temple and the inside was so unique. That night we just walked around and looked at the lights around the temple. Let me tell you.. I've never experienced such crazy roads and all I have to say is thank goodness for the GPS that we rented. Also a guy almost robbed us the first night, he asked Kyle if he had any cash and he said no, as we walk up to the store to get some food we look back and the guy is looking in our car (it was locked). When we came back the guy came running around the corner towards our car, luckily we were able to jump in our car and get out of there! That was my first experience with almost being robbed.
Day 2
The second day we visited the Battle of Manassas National Memorial (this was the first official battle of the Civil War). It was sweet to actually walk on the battle field with all of the canons in place how they would have been during that time. We also saw the big statue of "Stonewall Jackson", Kyle thought that was pretty awesome :) After that we took a drive down to the Mount Vernon Estate (George Washington's house and property) he owned 8,000 acres which his house was built on and the mansion was beautiful inside! My favorite room was the dining area, with the tall vaulted ceilings and the woodwork and craftsmanship was very detailed on the fireplace, ceiling, and walls. Also the walls were a rich green color (which back then it was very expensive to have colored walls because they used copper to make the color). In addition to the mansion there were 17 other buildings made for servants quarters, blacksmith shop, and other neat things. We also saw George Washington's tomb and the slave memorial. Afterwards we drove to Old Town Alexandria, they have the cutest downtown with fun little shops to checkout and such a charming feel to the area. We went on our dinner cruise there where we toured the Potomac River and overlooked Washington D.C at night, I loved it! We got to dress up nice, ate a yummy 4 course meal as we enjoyed the scenery, Kyle ordered prime rib and I ordered salmon for our main course, there was live music (which the piano guy got really into the music, which was fun to watch), and they had a ballroom inside for dancing(I loved that :). It was funny because a guy that was dancing with a girl threw her up and she smacked her head into the ceiling, I know that sounds mean of us but we were laughing a lot.
Day 3
After we went to sacrament meeting at 9 am we went to go check out all the sights in D.C. Pretty much once we got into D.C we were walking the rest of the day because we rode the transit into town. It was definitely a cold day, but it was neat to see all the historical monuments. There's SO much to see and do in D.C so we mainly wanted to see the major monuments. We went to the capital and there was a humongous 60 foot christmas tree that was chopped down from Stanislaus National Forest which was right in front of the capital. We visited the Museum of American History which is part of the Smithsonian which displayed how the lives were for Americans in the beginning when our country was still new and also we saw the area for Entertainment, Sports, and Music, I think the coolest thing I saw in that area was Dorothy's original ruby slippers from the "Wizard of Oz." We went by the White House, which they were having a christmas program outside the gates of the White House, they had a christmas tree for every state and had ornaments that were made from children from each individual state. Arizona's tree had pretty and colorful ornaments and Utah's ornaments were supposed to look like snowglobes (I have to admit that Arizona's looked better ;) We saw the Washington memorial, the Lincoln Memorial with the statue of Abraham Lincoln in the big chair (that was my favorite), the World War II Memorial, the Vietnam Memorial where we found Kyle's Uncle's name (Leslie Walker) on the wall of those who were killed from the war, and lastly we saw the Korean War Memorial (this one was really neat, they had statues of soldiers in capes and a wall with faces of soldiers etched in it). By the end of the day we felt like our feet were going to fall off from all the walking. Kyle really wanted to get a hot dog right from the stand, so that was the last thing we did before getting on the transit to go back to our hotel. For dinner we went to Red Lobster, which we'd never been there before, we got the crab legs that were freshly caught that day, Yummy!! I have to say they have excellent sea food in D.C :)
Day 4
Travel Day. We had our last complimentary breakfast at our hotel and headed for the airport. Our flight was at 1130 am and we arrived back in SLC at about 5 pm. Altogether, it was a wonderful trip! We were both missing Nash a lot, especially Kyle because it had been a week since he'd seen him so it was so good to see the little guy when we went to Camille and Jay's house. We spent the night at their place and Camille told us how Nash was during our trip. Nash loved playing with his cousins and Camille and Jay were so sweet to watch him for us!
