Thursday, July 7th, 2011

After breakfast today we went to the Museum of American History. First off we went to the timeline of the history of the United States and I tried desperately to get some of it to sink in to the girls, especially Genevieve, as I hoped it would make it more real when they studied it in history class later. Not sure if I was successful, although they were at least having a good time playing around together.

We all liked the displays of popular American culture, although Charlotte was absolutely heartbroken that R2D2 was not on display as she was really looking forward to seeing him. The girls and I liked the displays of the First Lady’s dresses,although Mark found something else to do at that time. Wespent about four hours at the museum, and concluded our visit seeing the original Star Spangled Banner. The kids were definitely surprised at how large it is, and I was surprised how much of it was missing having been cut away as souvenirs over the ages. What were they thinking cutting it! It was also funny seeing the kitchen of the ’60s on display, very similar to the kitchen in my parent’s house and I have a friend who has practically this same model and hers is in mint condition.

We were at this museum for over four hours (had lunch in their cafeteria) and after this long visit we returned to the hotel and let the girls swim. On the walk back we got a very scary call from the cleaners at our house, there was a rat in the girls room (!), what should they do. Oh man, now we’ve really got a problem. I sent an email to our neighborhood list for recommendations, and when we got back to the hotel Mark called the top of the list and arranged for them to come while we were gone and kill the little buggers. Meanwhile, we had the cleaners put Samoa the guinea pig on a table so the rats wouldn’t bother him and Mark’s mom came and took him to her house. Again, not the kind of news you want to receive while you’re on vacation.

We went to the pool and then after the swim the best place we could find togo to dinner was Gordon Biersch. I find it a sad state of affairs that the only restaurant we could find that was appropriate for a family and not fast food was one that was founded a few miles from our house! So we took the metro (lamo metro with a million price schedules that are impossible to compute necessitating a “ransom” at the end of the trip to get out of the station) to the restaurant, and the food was good and reasonably priced at least. Afterwards we took a cab to the Lincoln Memorial which was really fantastic to see at night. Truly outstanding. And then another cab back to our hotel because it was way past Charlotte’s bedtime and she couldn’t make the walk.

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