Washington D.C.-Spring Break 2013!

April 03, 2013

We woke up bright and early to drive to the nation's capitol! Thanks to Google and my friend from the area (you'll hear about her later), we mapped out what we wanted to see and set off for a long day of walking and seeing the sights. Oma and Opa thankfully offered to keep Ian and Maddy or else I don't think we would have lasted as long. We drove in and parked at Union Station and walked over to the capitol building. On our way there we passed the senate house and saw a car with Nez Perce County plates in Idaho! That is the county that both Scott and I were born in and grew up in! We thought that was pretty cool!

I love this picture of Rylan looking up, can he change our country?!?! Maybe when he is running for senate we can use this picture!

We made the trek towards all the monuments, we could see the Washington monument from far away. They were doing construction on it so we couldn't go up into it.

The World War II Memorial, Idaho is our favorite state!

The reflecting pool on the way to the Lincoln Memorial

We decided to take a moment and reflect into the reflecting pool...um why not?

Lincoln Memorial

Rylan really admires him and thanks to public education he actually knew quite a bit about him!

It was a busy spring day, perfect weather, it was brisk but after walking and warming up a bit it was not that bad.

The Vietnam Veterans Memorial

Rylan asked, "Is this all the people that ever died in a war," because of all of the names! We told him this was just ONE war.

It was overwhelming to see all those names especially standing next to my veteran!

The White House. We played a game of find the security camera or security guy. They were all over, in trees, and bushes, and on the roof.

Next we headed over to the Museum of American History. There were a lot of interesting exhibits that correlated with what M'Lynn has been learning. An exhibit about military history, U.S. presidents,

and my favorite, significant artifacts from American stories, like the ruby red slippers worn by Judy Garland in the Wizard of Oz, Archie Bunkers chair, a keystone of the LDS Nauvoo temple, and this guy, KERMIT!

There was a LINE to take a picture of him, he was definitely the most popular artifact in the exhibit!

By this time my old childhood friend Mary had met up with us. She works at the Smithsonian American Art Museum,

and she got us free tickets to see her favorite exhibit, the butterflies which is at the Natural History Museum.

This particular butterfly landed on her head and would not leave, someone had to grab the legs of the butterfly to help it off.

Mary's mom Tina just happened to be visiting so when Mary's husband got off work he picked her up and they took the train to meet up with us for dinner.

Mary took us to this place that served authentic Japanese ramen. Not your store bought 99 cent ramen, but the most aromatic ramen with the yummiest broth that marinates for days before being served to you. It had egg, pork, sprouts, green onions, and a salty seaweed, it looked like this:

It was so good and comforting and warmed us up after being in the cold all day. By this time we were pretty tired of walking so with the help of Mary (who takes the Metro everyday) we took the Metro back to Union Station, found our car and drove the two hours back to Oma and Opa's! Whew it was a fun and exhausting day. I am so glad that we did it, it was such a fun experience! It gave us a good taste of what D.C. is like just in case Scott ever works there, which is a possibility in the future.