Well we are in West Virginia visiting with my sister, my niece, and brother-in-law. We are having a great time not only visiting with family, but we are also taking the opportunity to see some other states while back here. Matthew is in heaven playing with his uncle Greg who took him to his job yesterday and bought him gifts....need I say more? He is also enjoying Noelle's cats and plays with them constantly. They have become his obsession and he frequently says, "I wish I had a pet."
On Wednesday, we headed out for Washington DC. I have been so excited about this for a number of reasons. The first, of course, is going to the White House. I was all geeked out by going and seeing it and knowing that this was going to be the closest I will have ever been to a sitting president....even though he is a couple of thousand feet from me, I would still be that close to him. Well, that is until Rich burst my bubble and told me that the president was making his first trip to California (that's right, that state in which I live and I had just left to fly across country to be the closest I will ever be to the president!) and would actually not be back to the Whitehouse during the time we were in DC. Lovely! The second reason I have been so excited is that fifth grade core curriculum is US history and government, and I simply can't wait to share all my pictures with my class.
The second day we were in DC, we took the Metro all the way to Arlington to see the cemetery. This was one of the highlights of the trip fro me. When we got to Arlington we looked up my great-grandparents grave sites and set off to find them. It was cold, raining, and a bit miserable, but we figured that we had to do this while we were here. So, a fifteen minute walk in the rain and wind brought us to their grave sites. As we were taking pictures and carefully describing this place to Matthew and it's significance, we heard a marching band start to play. We looked up and saw funeral procession coming right toward us. All of us later commented on how is was amazing that we could get so emotional and cry within a 45-second time period for someone we had never met, nor knew what their history was that brought them to this point. It was not only breathtakingly beautiful, but incredibly sad and emotional as well. I turned to Noelle and said videotape as much as you can without them seeing it so we are not disrespectful, but I wanted to share with others what we had seen. I hand my camera around my neck and I had no idea whether it was focused or even if the picture would be lined up, but I just kept snapping away in case I could get a few shots of what was going on.
With the rest of the day pretty much subject to rain, we decided to head back to get our car and just drive around to see all of the sites we could possibly get in. Forgive me, but most of these were taken with Noelle driving and me snapping away as fast as I could. At one point I hopped out of the car, on a very busy street, to run up and see the Lincoln Memorial and snap as many pics as I could. We drove all over the rest of the city and hit all the major places that we thought we couldn't leave without saying we had been there to see it. I really could come back and spend an entire week here and hit two to three major sites a day. We certainly made the most of our trip, the short time we were there.
