Washington DC - Day 1

I was so excited that Mike had agreed to a little trip to Washington DC for Memorial Day Weekend. I'm not going to lie though he was anything but excited when the time came to leave bright and early on Saturday morning, he was quite cranky in fact, but I'll let it slide. I obviously did the morning shift on driving while Mr. Crankpants slept for a while longer. We were very fortunate that we didn't hit any traffic and in no time we had arrived at our destination.

Our first stop of the weekend was a tour I had signed up for in advance of the US Capitol Building. I don't remember having even seen the Capitol during my brief visit in about 8th grade. First we had to get to the capitol though, which was no small feat, we couldn't figure out the GPS on my phone and it kept 'spinning around' it was a pain in the neck to follow. Then we also quickly released just hot hot it was turning out to be, by the time we arrived at The Capitol we were both drenched in sweat, I literally had a band of sweat across me where my camera bag was.

We made it just in time for our preassigned tour time. We were glad we signed up in advance and didn't have to wait in line for the hour-long free tour. If we did have to wait I think afterwards we both would have been very disappointed on the tour. They literally take you through only 4 rooms in The Capitol, it might have only been 3 even, you see the Dome, and some statues and a 15 minute film, that's about it. For anyone else going in the future, save yourself the hour and just tour the grounds instead.

After our tour of The Capital we used the tunnel path to go across the street to the Library of Congress. I have to say it was really impressive, I'm glad we ventured over just to see it. The architecture is beautiful!

The Capitol & Library of Congress

By this point we were absolutely starving and ready for a bite to eat. Luckily "We, The Pizza" is located only a few short blocks away from The Capitol so we were in the perfect spot. With the heat and being so hungry that beer tasted incredible. There is nothing  like a cold beer on a hot day to quench your thirst. It also didn't hurt that the pizza was really good too, this coming from a New Yorker! 

We def did not plan to wear matching shirt colors! 

We continued our walk down the National Mall, but the heat was pretty bad, we weren't really able to walk to much without the heat getting to us. 

We eventually ended up at the National Air & Space museum and since it is free, we just walked right in. We did poke around the museum a little bit. We even saw Gene Krantz' vest that he wore for the Apollo 13 mission - Love that movie! 

Finally for dinner that night, I had made reservations for us at The Old Ebbitt Grill. It was a really nice little restaurant, busy and loud but appropriate for a city restaurant near all the action. The food was really good too. I couldn't resist the Spring Vegetable Ravioli's, made with asparagus, oven roasted tomatoes, roasted onions and mushrooms, that totally had my name written all over it, Mike's dinner was good too! It was the perfect place to go for dinner while in DC, I def recommend it!