DC Visit

This post is a little overdue! It always takes me longer to get up the posts with pictures since it takes more effort to get the pictures off my camera. Anyway, the weekend before last (April 26th and 27th), we took a quick trip to Washington, DC. When I say, quick, I mean less than 48 hours! But, we got in a ton of stuff for such a short trip. We stayed with our friend April, who took us to the Eastern Market, the Library of Congress (twice), and the Cubs vs. Nationals baseball game -- all on Saturday. We were exhausted, so we slept in Sunday and grabbed lunch with another friend, Tracy, on Sunday before flying out.

Friday night
We had a bit of an issue getting boarding passes to fly out of Indy to DC on Friday night. Thankfully we got to the airport in time to get those issues worked out since it took them 30 minutes to print our boarding passes at the ticket counter (thanks to a guy with a name similar to Todd's being on the no-fly list). When we arrived in DC at 8:45pm, April picked us up and took us to a fish restaurant so Todd could get his fix of fresh fish being so close to the ocean.

Saturday
We stared the day of with April's special recipe buttermilk pancakes. They are so good! (Thanks to George for passing down the fabulous recipe, which I may have to try even though they are not low-fat.) After breakfast, we checked out the Eastern Market in DC in the morning. We have been there before, but it is always fun to explore and see what is at the market. We saw some interesting items and I had to keep Todd from buying a bead necklace (why he likes this stuff is beyond me). On the way back to April's apartment, Todd asked if we could go to the Library of Congress. We had never been, so we went in and checked out all the touristy things - Thomas Jefferson's library, several exhibits, the cool interior of the building, and general nosing around. But, Todd was on the hunt for a book on the Royer ancestry. We tried to go look at the book, but it required an actual library card. They sent us across the street to an annex building where Todd was able to get a card in a matter of minutes by just providing his Indiana Driver's License. By then it was around 1pm, so we decided to grab lunch before hunting down the book. When we went back to the Library of Congress (for the second time), we found the Genealogy Room and filled out all the paperwork to get the book on Todd's family. Unfortunately, it was going to take an hour or more to get the book from the stacks. Who knew - we would have gone back before going to lunch. So, we missed out on the book, but now that Todd has his card from the Library of Congress, we can always go back and look again!


Saturday night
Check Nationals Park off the list! One of the main reasons to visit DC, besides to see our awesome friends, was to go to the Cubs game Saturday night. In our journey to visit as many MLB stadiums as possible, we had to get to DC to see the National's new stadium and the Cubs being in town made the trip even more worth it. We got awesome seats and had a generally great time at the ballpark. The tickets we had included a $35 food/souvenir credit per ticket. So, we were running around the stadium buying food and trying to use up the money. I tried to buy some food at one point, but the cashier did something wrong and my ticket came up as invalid. I was so mad because they refused to try to scan the ticket again. Seriously!?! I told the guy there was money on there, but he refused to try to re-scan. So, we had to pay a little, but Todd spent the rest of the leftover credits on a Nationals t-shirt before leaving (my ticket credits scanned just fine at that point - ugh!). In the end, the Cubs won and Big Z had an awesome outing, which made it extra fun! The rain held off for the entire game, too. April and looked at each other because we felt drops starting to fall during the last out of the game. Of course, the downpour came as we ran through the streets of DC trying to get on the metro back to April's apartment in Arlington. We were soaked when we got home, but at least the game was dry.



Sunday
We slept in Sunday morning after running around all day Saturday. Around lunchtime, we met up with my friend Tracy from college and her boyfriend John. We went to Cheesecake Factory for lunch and helped John through his first experience there. It is amazing he lived in Chicago forever before moving to DC and had never been to the Cheesecake Factory. Of course, we ate too much and still managed to eat cheesecake for dessert. After that, April took us to the airport to catch our 3:30pm flight home. The flight home was just as eventful as the flight out. We arrived in Indy, but the electronic arm they swing out to the plane door was not working, so we could not de-board the plane. So, we sat for 45 minutes at the gate while that figured out a way to get us out.

Many thanks to April (and her roommate Adam) for hosting us and hauling us all over DC. It was a fun time to get to see friends, catch a game, and see some more of the DC landmarks. We'll definitely be back soon!