D.C. Day 1

Every year my dad takes us on a family vacation. Well this year he decided to do two trips. One for just the adults and one that we will be taking in July with everyone. Justin's sweet and brave family watched Ruthie for four days while we went and lived it up in D.C. Sally even took off work to do this for us. You guys are seriously the best! At first I thought I would be really sad leaving Ruthie, but we were busy the whole time that I didn't have a mintue to think too much about it. I did text every day though. I thought talking on the phone might make me or her too sad. Because I took about a million pictures and we did SO SO much in the four days we were there I decided to break this up and do a post for each day.

Day 1: Wake up at 4:30 to make a 6 a.m flight. Despite the hour, we were ready to go and have some fun. This picture was before I knew the flight would take six hours. Don't you love how matching Justin and I are? No, we didn't do this on purpose but it does seem to happen a lot.

This is my brother Jeff and us on the shuttle ready to go grab some grub at union station. Once again we matched with our greens!

I had to post this picture because lets face it, I look rad! haha but seriously those glasses are.

Then after we ate dinner we took a three hour tour on a bus which ended up being three and a half hours around various monuments. It was a tour by twilight from 7 p.m to 10:30 p.m. We were exhausted by the end but it was so neat to see.

It was hard getting good picture of the capital on a moving bus.

I was trying to be artsy with this one. If you look behind and in between the trees you can see the Washington Monument. It is some ridiculous 800 steps to the top.

Our first stop was the Jefferson memorial. Forgive me for being a dork in most of these pictures. I decided that I was sick of just smiling pictures. I guess I thought dorky poses would be better?!?

I am saying shhh in this picture because my mom was whispering really softly and I could hardly hear her. I thought that was funny and decided to record that moment.

Next stop was the Roosevelt memorial. He has four but this is only one of them. I heard a gentlemen behind us say if you rub his finger or the dogs nose (no picture sorry) you will have good luck. If you look at his finger you can see the discoloration from everyone rubbing it. We decided to give it a try and I crossed my fingers for double luck!

On this stop there were a couple of things to see. The first is a picture of all the names from the Vietnam War. It is touching to see all those names. You can not even imagine how many names there were. A photograph would not catch the length of this monument so I took close ups. Red and white roses were left by the names. Also you can see in the one picture a thank you note left by a child who understands the sacrifice that was given for his freedom.


It was really dark, sorry for the quality of this picture. Here is the HUGE famous Abraham Lincoln monument. It was amazing. Sadly we did not make it to the Korean War Monument because we had to be back on the bus. I hope to be able to go back and see it one day when our kids are big enough to understand.

The last stop and one of the newest was the World War II memorial. Once again it was too dark so taking pictures was hopeless. This one was probably one of my favorites. It was beautiful. I don't even know how to describe it so I won't. We finally made it back to our hotel around 11 and went straight to bed, exhausted from an eventful day.