DC Vacation: Day One

I started to write this earlier and somehow deleted the post again, the same way I did last night. I better stop multi-tasking or I'm never going to get anything on the blog.

So, the first day of our trip we skipped church because I was afraid that I would rush to get ready and forget something. I got up late and was very disorganized and I had a lot of work to do before we could leave. I cleaned the kitchen in preparation for the trip. My kitchen is the cleanest when we are away for vacation. We were a little tried at the start of this trip because we had spent a number of days getting ready for Sarah's 8th grade graduation and for a visit from my in-laws. We had a party for her and I wasn't supposed to do the cooking but it turned out I did because my husband never ordered the ribs. Plus I had to run around to all the malls and stores looking for a dress for Sarah for graduation (my daughter was one of the few girls who stuck to the dress code, everyone else was dressed in sundresses or whatever they are calling them today) and a swimsuit for Samantha and capris and shorts for the trip.

After I finished cleaning the kitchen and I finished packing, we loaded up the car. We ran to the bank to get money for the trip (you are getting the impression that we leave everything to the last minute, aren't you?) and at the bank Samantha tells us that she has forgotten to bring her camera, so back to the house we go but she couldn't find it. The last place she had it was her field trip, so now I'm sure she lost it and we would never see it again (it's a low-end digital camera that I bought because I believed she would either lose it or drop it).

The trip was uneventful, I slept though most of it. We don't live that far from DC, about a four hour trip, so we weren't too tired from driving when we got there. I also read in the car, a murder mystery, I like light reading in the car (though I always shlep along commentaries that I never read).

We stayed at a Hampton Inn in Largo that was nice. We like Hampton Inn because you get breakfast in the morning and free Internet. This time my husband brought along his laptop too. Sarah left her's at home because she was afraid that it was going to get stolen. We debated for awhile how we could protect them while we were in DC during the day and we decided to put them in my suitcase and lock it with a luggage lock. It was an annoying routine but we were happy we didn't have to worry about them.

We decided to get something to eat locally and go into the city the next day. The reason that we picked Largo is that it was really close to the Metro station, it is actually the last stop in the blue line. We found out there was a Bugaboo Creek Steakhouse in the area and drove over to the shopping complex that it was located in. As soon as we drive up to the complex we see a huge Magic Johnson Movie Theater!


In fact you can see it from the train station. I'd heard that he had started a chain but I'd never seen one. I immediately thought of the Proud Family and it's spoof of Magic Johnson, the Wizard (what can I say, I have a preteen). In the Wizard's theater there are basketball shaped booths and salisbury steak -- but I digress.

Since it was Father's Day and after 7:00 on a Sunday night, everything was crowded, so we decided to go to a Tex-Mex fast food restaurant instead. After dinner we stopped at the Metro for a schedule and to figure out what kind of tickets we should buy.

The Metro station was within walking distance of the hotel and was big, new and pretty nice looking.



Now, here is one of the most amazing things for me on this trip, I thought the Metro ride was going to be one big pain the butt like the subway system in NY city and so I was apprehensive about how much time we were going to spend riding it. I was shocked to find out that it is nothing like that I thought it was going to be. It was one of the best parts of the trip, I loved the Metro and had a lot of fun switching trains and figuring out which train to take next and going from station to station. The ride into the city was pleasant and was the only time I got to read on the trip (I read half of a book in the commute to and from the city). It was a lot of fun and once we figured out how to buy our tickets, we were set and fell into a little routine. The Metro is clean and the people who work in it our wonderful and friendly and very helpful. We did not meet one grumpy or rude person the entire time we were on the Metro, both workers and riders were incredibly nice. I can't praise this system enough. For once the government got something right and they should be praised for it.

And what is so great about this system is that it is so clear where to get on and off and where to get a connecting train and they have a great system were you only have to pay $6.50 and you can ride it all day after 9:30 am (to avoid the rush hour traffic). It was kind of funny each day seeing the tourists getting their tickets a few minutes before 9:30 and waiting to exactly 9:30 to start their commute. It could have been a problem if we wanted to get a pass to the Captial (everyone gets there by 9:00) or the Washington Monument but we didn't want passes so we were OK getting to the city a little later than the average tourists and in some instances it worked better than getting their early.

But we didn't figure any of this out the first night, we had planned to buy our tickets Sunday night so that we didn't run into a mess during rush hour traffic but it was too complicated, so we went back to the hotel and Doug researched what type of tickets we should buy and I posted to the blog and did Blogging Chicks stuff until all hours of the morning (this was a trend on this trip, btw) and we decided to go to the zoo the next day and buy a one day pass which turned out the be a very smart decision.