Saturday: DC Bound

For having gone to bed ridiculously late Friday night I got up ridiculously early, especially for me, on day two of vacation, however it was worth it. The night before we had looked up exactly how I would get back to Penn Station to head towards DC. I would take the M72 and then the 1 (I think, I have slept since then, this is why I should blog immediately). At any rate, M72 across the park to Central Park West and 72nd then to the subway.

It went quite well, even to the point that some guy on the subway asked me where something was on his map. Of course that something happened to be Tiffany's, which I happen to be an expert on! Yeah that pretty much made my life!

I got off at Penn Station and headed up to find the DC Deluxe, the bus I would be heading to DC on. I found it no problem and went into Dunkin' Donuts for coffee and a donut before I left. That is when I remembered another reason I love this city: calories posted on menus. Hello heaven.

I got on the bus, got an early morning check in text from my dog sitter (who is the best person ever since I called her Thursday night and asked if she would check on Zoe for me!) who also got a perfect score on her first OU grad paper! Yay Amanda!

The bus driver was hilarious. He reminded me of a black Donnie Wahlberg, and if you know me anyone who reminds me of Ddub makes me happy. I got a window seat and the seat next to me to myself. There was electricity on the bus, so my phone stayed nice and charged (a problem throughout this trip). I read quite a bit. This book is seriously good, I highly recommend it!

As we pulled left NYC I was a bit sad, because I just got there and here I was headed back to Jersey.

I added several states to my visited list: Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, and whatever you count DC as (for counting purposes I counted it).

Entering Delaware:

And in Baltimore:

And finally made it to DC (there were no photos of this because I was getting phone calls). We drove around looking for parking for quite awhile, but in the midst I got to see the White House and the Washington Monument. I knew that, because it was going to be a short trip, I wouldn't get to see everything I wanted, but the first stop was the Smithsonian, the museum of American History. I have degrees in both Poli Sci and History and most of the time I ignore this, however certain places and times of the year bring these interests out. DC is apparently one of those places.

We looked at the "map" and tried to find the entertainment section because I had something in mind that I wanted to see, however we couldn't find that section on the list. So we went through the military history portion of the museum and as soon as we hit World War II I was in heaven. Here is Rosie the Riveter (our theme for JL this year!):

We came out of that exhibit, thinking the museum closed at 5:00, and went upstairs and I saw Dumbo, which I figured meant the entertainment section, however we couldn't seem to get there, but we ended up in the American Presidency.

After we came out of that exhibit (on the opposite side from where we started) I was determined to figure out how to get to Dumbo and we finally did.

And here is what I wanted to see:

Ruby Slippers!

By this time it was about 4:45, but we stopped and asked what time the museums closed and were told 5:30, so we still had 45 minutes!

We headed over to the Natural History Museum, which the building itself was beautiful. I didn't take as many pictures as I should, but oh well. We looked at the mammals and then went up and saw the butterflies. Unfortunately we were too late to go into where the butterflies were, but they were pretty through the window.

We then headed back to the Capitol to head to the car to head to eat (which sounded like an excellent idea since I had only had that donut all day!). I wanted pictures of the Capitol because it was so pretty at night, however my new camera's flash did not want to play friendly, so I tried without the flash which resulted in blurry photos. We tried balancing the camera on my head to steady it, however apparently I don't hold still very well. I ended up remembering the auto timer and set it up on the edge of a fountain and did pretty well. I did the same for the Washington Monument, but probably the best was on the front of the Capitol.

Top of my head shot

Not too shabby

Washington Monument

I really, really, really like this one!

That was about all for Saturday, besides a delicious sushi dinner and a lot of college football. Sunday had more of DC events and all kinds of fun (if you can call it that) on the trip back to Whitney's.