Julie and Mom's adventure to our nations Capital!!

So Thursday night my mom and I drove down to DC from Pittsburgh during rush hour...so you can imagine how that was.  Everytime I put in the address for the Hotel into mapquest or into my GPS it wanted to take me through the City to get to the Turnpike...well, that wasn't an option.  So with GPS at hand...turning off we want to pay tolls so it took us past WVU... we went on our way.   

The preps to get to this point my mom asked me to make all the accomodations.  When I go on trips I like to stay in local hotels, if I can, and especially historic hotels.  Well, my mom had a different idea.  She said that she only wants to stay at places that are known...like a Best western or Motel 6!  So I went to AAA and picked up a travel book.

  I looked at the hotels...where they are located in conjunction to the city and pricing.  Then I looked at hotel that was 3 star rated by AAA, a price of the ones my mom would want to stay at that are 2 star and a historic hotel.  I called my mom and ran it by her.  She said she didn't like the idea of it.  I told her that if AAA rated it higher than the other ones then it must be good and we should stay there.  I called the hotel and since it is a local hotel you have to be checked in by 11PM.  I told them that I was driving from Pittsburgh and that it was going to be a hard thing to do!  They said midnight is the latest! 

So we're driving steadily to CD on the interstates and it starts to rain..

.heavily!  Well, my mom hates driving in something other than sunny weather...I ask if she wants me to take over but she doesn't want to pull over because of fear.  Well, we keep driving and she starts to get relieved...see a month earlier she bought a new Altima and upgraded from a Malibu.  She finally sees that ti's a good investment and sees that it's not as scary as she was envisioning and with the GPS unit it would tell her when and where she had to drive so we didn't have to keep the lights on in the car at night for me to look at a map!!  Obstacle one is out of the way.

We get to our hotel, The Morrison Clark Hotel on L Street, and check in 20 minutes before we loose our reservation!  We give our key to the Valet and head up to our room where we are exhausted from working and driving all day! 

The next morning we have 2 worlds collide.

  I am a night owl...my mom a morning person.  She gets up at 8 and the earliest I wake up is 10...so she takes a shower and eats a light breakfast and I get up at 10 like I always do.  Good thing I can just head out without any prep time and still look good!!! 

We head out and decide we want to eat breakfast.  The second issue...I want to eat somewhere locally and my mom wants a big chain!  We compromise of a hotel on Pennsylvania Avenue and we had a really good healty breakfast to my mom's liking! 

After breakfast we decided to head towards our first touristy event...the white house...the waiter said it was a couple blocks down on Pennsylvania Ave.   We head out and we see the White House from a distance.

..the only thing is is my mom isn't as youthful as she once was and was already getting tired from our mile of a walk we did that day already.  She sees a tour bus and says "Hey... you wanna go on that" with a puppy dog look.  I say "NO...it's too much and we can just walk" and then I ask if she really wanted to.  She said yeah and that she'd pay the $64 for the tickets.  So I cave in.

During the tour our driver was actually pretty funny...he cracked a lot of jokes...and they all bashed me on my Steelers shirt...I need to stop wearing that on my excursions to other cities; it's not a welcoming shirt!  But on the tour we got a direct shot to see the Jefferson Memorial, the White House, Washington Monument, Vietnam Memorial, Lincoln Memorial and the Botanical Gardens.

  On the tour you could get off the bus...go do what you wanted to do and then get back on a different bus. 

We started walking around after the Washington Monument...with my GPS on pedestrian mode...to get us to see Ford's Theater where Lincoln was shot.  But as a major theme to my traveling dismay...the things I want to see are shut down until June 30th!!  So we wondered around the corner and found the International Spy Museum.  It was a pretty cool museum.  We went in and stood in lines, I hate lines, and got to go to a screening area where you get to see a short video about spies and then you get to get a alternate identity that you are supposed to remember through the museum.  We got to play with the spy gear, take quizes to test our memory and read up on who were spies during the wars...and did you know that Julia Childs (the cook) was a spy?  Who knew.  Then there was an Aston Martin that was on display and it showed the knives coming out of the tires to slash the car next to it and the headlights turning into a machine gun.  The older gentleman next to me was like, I have a top of the line Cadillac and it doesn't do that.  I looked at him with a blank face and said to my mom...how can he compare a Aston Martin to a Cadillac?

While on the tour I got a call from my buddy from Annapolis who I went to college with.  Chris said he was done with work and asked where we wanted to eat dinner at.  I told him the Old Post Office Dinner.  He met us down there and we went into the Old Post Office...which I do have to say if you are traveling and don't want to look out of place because you have a map take a Garmin Nuvi GPS...everybody thought it was my phone.  Including the security guy to get into the Old Post Office.  But we went in there and couldn't find the restaurant that I thought was there...it was just a food court...sigh...!!  =*(

So our next step was to find a place.  I powered on my GPS to find a restaurant.  Bullseye!  Some seafood place in chinatown...there were alot of restaurants in chinatown that weren't chinese...which I thought was weird.  But the seafood was amazing...a little expensive...but that's what you get for not wanting to go to a chain.  We had a good time and headed up back to the Hotel...