The Awesome

Jeremy had to go to DC for work, so we decided to make a family trip out of it.  It was about a 4 hour drive.  I was very surprised when we first arrived in the city because there are no very tall buildings.  Most of DC looks like the downtown of any city.  Of course in the national mall, each building could probably be confused for the White House.

Our hotel messed up our reservation so that we did not have a room for the first night.  We had to go to a hotel that was much more expensive and further away for Thursday night.  We spent that evening walking around looking for somewhere to eat dinner.

Jeremy had work to do first thing Friday morning.  I had planned on going out with the kids while he was gone, but we were not walking distance from anything, like I had planned.  Jeremy got back later that morning but had to go out again in the afternoon.  We had to check out of that hotel and into the original hotel.  Check out time is 12 and check in time is 3.  Jeremy had to be at his appointment at 2:30.  We would have liked to go to a museum during the wait, but it got really complicated with parking being completely unavailable.  So we decided to go to a museum I heard about that was on the outskirts of town,  The Washington Dolls’ House and Toy Museum.  I’m going to have to figure out what happened to that museum, because it certainly was not at the address I have for it.  We wandered around the Mazza Gallerie mall and considered going to see a movie, but there was not enough time. Then we drove around looking for parking or something to do.  Jeremy went to his appointment while the kids and I walked up and down Wisconsin Ave.  I should mention that it has been raining the entire time since we arrived.  It was kind of a drag for everyone.

Fortunately, Jeremy was able to get his appointment done early.  Then the hotel let us check in early.  From there, everything went smoothly and we had a great time.  We were able to walk everywhere from our hotel, which was just a couple blocks from the White House.  We did A LOT of walking.

After we got settled into our hotel on Friday afternoon everyone was grumpy, so we took a nap.  Everyone woke up on the other side of the bed, ready to go.  The museums were getting close to closing time.  We hurried and were able to see a couple wings of the American History Museum before it closed.  Then we went to the Washington Monument and the White House.  We went out for dinner and ended the night on a very contented note.

Saturday was the day that we spent the whole entire day out on our feet from morning to evening.  We started out on the metro to spare ourselves a little walking.  It’s always cool to ride the public transit.  DC’s is very unique in how clean and spacious it’s train stops are.  Unfortunately, they don’t go to nearly enough places to save tourists much walking.  We went to Union Station, which feels more like a cross between a mall and an airport than a train station.  Then we went to the National Post Office Museum.  Surprisingly, I would rate that one as the best for kids.  They had tons of interactive exhibits that the kids enjoyed a lot, and you get lots of stuff to take home.  It was almost empty, too.  Then we went to the Museum of the American Indian.  We had a snack in their eatery.  We had already eaten lunch, but we agreed that the menu there looked much more interesting than the other museum eateries that all serve some variation of chicken fingers or pizza.  Then we went to the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum.  I learned that this is the most visited museum in the world.  It is a cool museum.  We were seriously tired and the museum was seriously busy, so we left without exploring too much more than the main level.  From there we headed to the U.S. Botanic Garden.  Jeremy and I enjoyed that quite a bit.  The kids were good sports.  They thought it was cool to see some of the unique plants.  There was a children’s garden, but there wasn’t really much to it.  What was cool, though, is that they had plants that we could take for free.  We went home with a spaghetti squash and an heirloom tomato plant, which I just planted in my new vegetable garden.

We were walking on our way back to complete the loop to our hotel, when we decided to try and finish seeing the American History Museum before it closed.  They had a temporary special exhibit for Abraham Lincoln.  We were about halfway through that exhibit when the museum staff started making everyone leave.  We tried to keep looking and reading on our way out, but they were very persistent that we leave right away.  Oh, well.  At that point we were all so tired we were falling over, but we decided to walk out to the Lincoln Memorial.  Oh my gosh, I’m tired just thinking about all that walking.  We stopped at the WWII memorial on the way and at the Korean and Vietnam War Memorials as we were leaving.

I took a list of the Washington Post’s best bets for restaurants.  They had a lot of suggestions for cheap restaurants that are supposed to be very good.  We ate at two of those, Surfside (Carribean/Mexican), and Nando’s Peri Peri (South African roast chicken).  Both were really really good and cost about as much as fast food.  For dinner Saturday, we decided to deviate from the “cheap” list and go for sushi.  We ate at Kaz Sushi Bistro.  The menu was pretty standard for what you get at most sushi places, but we were sorely tempted by a listing on the menu that said that the chef would make us eight completely unique dishes including six small entrees, a sushi course, and dessert.  We ordered it to share and asked if there were things that the kids might like.  We thought that she said maybe two people could share it if we got something else for the kids.  She was actually saying we should order two and some other things for the kids.  So we got the kids some shrimp tempura and edamame, and then sat back as course after course of BEAUTIFUL, delicious, one-of-a-kind food was served to us.  The bill was shocking.  I’ll just say it didn’t cost too much less than our two nights at the Hilton Garden Inn, Downtown DC.  I have trouble saying it wasn’t worth it though.

Sunday, we went to the Natural History Museum.  It’s a nice complement to the one in NYC.  Much smaller, but free.  Dinosaurs are always a winner with our kids, especially Silas, who tells me that he would like to go to the store and buy a dinosaur bone toy PLEEEEEAAAASSSSEE at least twice and hour.  After that, we went to the Holocaust Memorial Museum.  They had a special children’s exhibit, which was a really good introduction of the subject for children.  Milo was very affected by it.  The rest of the museum is kind of intense for kids, I thought.  It also doesn’t handle the kinds of crowds that were pushing through it that day.  It merits a more careful perusal on a slower day.  (BTW, I read the news…glad I wasn’t there yesterday.)

We really enjoyed our stay in DC.  We saw and learned so much, and yet there was so much that we didn’t get to see, or that we just skimmed over when we would have liked to look closely.  It’s pretty much decided that we will make the trip again to try to see some of the things we missed.

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 11th, 2009 at 10:23 am and is filed under Family Time, Touristy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.