There were still so many things I wanted to do in DC but we were limited by exhaustion, the need to get some traveling done tonight, and the fact that it was supposed to start raining that afternoon.
Our first challenge of the day was to find some way to get all the stuff from our room into our car. On the way to the parking garage, we stopped at Potbelly for breakfast. We hadn't had a chance to try it in Chicago, so this seemed like a good time. The girls said it was the best bagels they had ever had! My sandwich was really good, too. It was like a toasted Quiznos sandwich, but with eggs, bacon and cheese. It was just the pick-me-up we needed.
We also stopped at the Macy's that was across the street from the parking garage. During our Chicago pedway tour we went through a Macy's and right through the cosmetic department. While everyone in the group was staring up at the Tiffany ceiling, K was enthralled with the girls who were doing makeup consultations with the customers. She stared at them with dreamy eyes and begged to have a chance to do it herself, but obviously we could not stop and try it then, so I promised her at some point we would be sure to go by a Macy's and have makeup done on her. When we walked to the garage yesterday and noticed it nearby, we planned to stop by this morning.
It took a while to find someone who worked at the makeup counter, but finally I saw someone at the Chanel counter so I asked her if she would be willing to put a little bit of makeup on K. There were no customers around, so I didn't think it would be a big deal. She very curtly told me that there was a minimum purchase amount of $55 to have a makeup consultation, so we walked over to the Estee Lauder counter and the woman there told us that they couldn't do makeup applications on kids under 12. I thought about trying again, but the security guards were eyeing us strangely so I decided to just leave the store. K was very sad and hurt, but I told her I would put some of my makeup on her later. Poor thing. :(
Now we had to drive to the hotel, bring all of our stuff down from the 9th floor (a corner room, and a fabulous view!), and then do our loading/unloading game of Tetris on the side of the road since we had taken our cooler, all our food, and 3 sleeping bags upstairs with us. It was probably very entertaining for everyone who passed by.
After the car was loaded (and we were WAY over our 15 minute stopping limit), we went inside to check out, and then drove the car back to the parking garage where we could still park for free until 4pm.
Madame Tussauds wax museum was only a few blocks away, so we walked there first. There was a brief intro video on how the figures were made, which was really interesting to watch. The first half of the museum had figures of all 44 Presidents in the order that they served. Unlike the museum back home, the figures are standing all around the room and you can walk in front and behind them and even stand beside them for photos. That was pretty cool! They just asked that you not touch the face or hair. There was almost no one in the museum when we went, but I was thinking the whole time how weird it would be if other people were in the room because it would be hard to tell who was real and who was wax.
Getting that close to the figures, it was amazing how life-like their faces were. And you could stand right next to them and see how tall they were compared to you.
They also had interactive areas, like this one in Eisenhower's room.
That's K hiding down there
C decided she wanted to challenge Hoover
And then A and K went walking on the moon with Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong (K is still wearing one of Jackie Kennedy's fur coats)
Followed by some time in the Oval Office.
The rest of the museum was filled with mostly movie and music stars like Tom Cruise, Leonardo DiCaprio, Jennifer Lopez, Britney Spears, Johnny Depp, Rhianna, Angelina Jolie, Brad Pitt, etc. I tried desparately to think of any movies they had seen or songs they had heard that had any of these people in them, but all I could think of was that Johnny Depp was in Willy Wonka, Elton John sang Benny and the Jets, and they recognized the names of Madonna and Michael Jackson. One other area had TV personalities like Stephen Colbert, Oprah and Katie Couric, but it dawned on me about half way through that all of these 'popular' people weren't any more familiar to them than all of the dead presidents. Weird.
We had seen some food trucks on 12th Street (and I had read back at home about the miles of food trucks in DC), so we went to check it out. Unfortunately, most of them were gone before we got back, but we did see a Chick-Fil-A food truck there.
I kind of wanted to get back on the Big Bus and see some more of the city, but the girls wanted ice cream. Unfortunately none of the food trucks had any so I looked it up on my phone and found that the Old Post Office Pavilion (which is soon to become a Donald Trump something-or-other) had a Ben & Jerry's inside. What I didn't know was that Ben & Jerry's charges $5 for the smallest size ice cream they sell. That was completely not worth it to me, so we resolved to find somewhere else to shop for ice cream.
We kept walking down 12th and just past the Pavilion was a bike rental shop. The girls had asked if we could rent a bike when they saw some back near the food trucks but I wasn't sure if we could pull it off. We looked at the price, though, and it was only $10 for a bike so I figured maybe we'd try it. I wish I had a picture of us on the bikes. I'm sure we looked pretty cute. :) We rented a two-person tandem bike and two kid's bikes. I thought it would be good to have an extra seat in case someone got tired, and A has been wanting to try a two-person bicycle for a while now.
After we got settled on the bikes, I knew exactly where I wanted to go next. I thought A might like the Bureau of Engraving and Printing, where they make dollar bills (not to be confused with the US Mint, where they make coins). It was closed on the weekend, but open today. The tour was actually pretty interesting, and with the exception of the candy smell, it reminded me oddly of the Jelly Belly Factory tour. No cameras were allowed inside, so I don't have any pictures of this place except for the gift shop, where A bought a baseball cap with an eagle on it that she loves so incredibly much, and she wanted to be sure I included a picture on the blog. She does not ever let that hat out of her sight. Hopefully she has better luck with it than I had with mine.
Next we decided to head to the Lincoln Memorial so we could see the front of it and actually see Lincoln. They remembered him walking around in the Night At The Museum movie, so they wanted to see the giant Lincoln in person. After many stops and delays, we finally made it out to the Memorial. When we first got to the plaza in the center of the steps, I told the girls to look around and look out at the water and see if this place looked familiar. I was hoping they would recognize it from the video we watched yesterday of Martin Luther King, Jr.'s speech and the crowd that was gathered here. But when I said, "Do you recognize this place?" and they all said 'yes', C said "That's where the giant squid lives", and pointed at the Reflecting Pool. Sigh. I waited with the bikes while A and C ran up the steps to see him and take pictures (guess we didn't plan that out very well).
A wasn't happy with this picture. I don't think C was being very helpful
While A was coming back down the stairs, C had apparently run behind me while I didn't notice because K had told her that there were ducklings in the water at the bottom of the steps (The Reflecting Pool). Last night in Georgetown, K had spotted some ducklings in the water and kept asking all day today if we could go back there and see the ducklings again. So when she caught sight of these ducklings, she wasn't going to let the opportunity pass her by. When A finally reached me and I realized C wasn't with her (and where she was), I had A help me move the bikes to the top of the stairs that lead down to the pool so I could see them and her while I went and retrieved her sisters.
As I started to go down the steps I caught sight of them holding something in their hands and a big duck jumped out of the water and snapped at them. Good grief! They claim that the duckling was standing on the ground and they just picked it up. I'm not completely sure I believe that. At any rate, I told them to put the duckling back and that we had to go because we only had about 30 minutes to have the bikes back and considering how long it took us to get out there, I just hoped we'd make it. As I walked up the stairs, a man stopped me and asked me to take his picture with his phone. With my back turned to the bikes, I heard a crashing noise and looked around to see that K had gotten on her bike and tipped over and had fallen down the stairs with/on her bike (she only fell 4 steps and stopped - thank God!). She had scratches all over and a few bruises already forming by the time we got her and the bike back up the steps. Luckily I had the tandem bike so she was able to just relax as we rode back to the bike rental place.
We made it with about 10 minutes to spare, so we turned the bikes in and then wondered what, if anything, to do next. The capitol building was just about the only thing we hadn't seen and since K wasn't much up for walking and we were really close to a Big Bus stop, we decided to catch the next one that showed up. It was the Red Line this time, so we hopped on to see some more sites before we got on the road. I guess I'm not sure what I was really thinking at this point because it was almost 6pm and the buses had stopped for the day, so this one was going to take us all the way out to Union Station, and then abandon us there.
However, once we got on, we realized that this bus had a live narrator on it instead of the pre-recorded commentary over headphones. She was a very enthusiastic girl in her 20's who shared C's name (although she spelled it differently) and she was fun to listen to. C actually moved into the seat right next to hers so she could talk to her (and of course her sisters followed), so the announcer spent the next 30 minutes talking about the buildings we were passing 80% of the time and talking to them 20% of the time. It must have sounded weird to the other passengers, especially the ones on the lower level who couldn't see or hear the people she was talking to. And even when she was narrating, she looked right at them and pointed around like she was talking just to them, so they were really paying attention and into it.
Of course even though the rain had held off for so long, we knew it was imminent, and a few minutes after we got on the bus it started raining. Several people went down to the lower level for shelter - but not us!
Once we finally left the Big Bus at Union Station, we had to find a way back to our car in the parking garage. We probably should have taken a cab, but we decided instead to take the Metro (the subway). There was a stop right across the street from the garage, so we decided to go for it. Thankfully a man showed us how to use the ticket machines because they were a little confusing, and I figured later that we probably paid as much for the four of us to ride the Metro as we would have paid for a cab. Oh well.
We missed the first train so we had to wait around for a while. The girls have become increasingly restless on this trip and are always in constant motion whenever possible, so they were probably a little irritating to all the people who were exhausted from work and just trying to get home (sorry!). Once on board, they also decided it was so much more fun to stand up when the Metro was moving instead of sitting down, so even though there was hardly anyone on the train, they stood the entire time.
Finally back at our car, I knew we weren't going to get too far tonight. I also knew we would most likely be stuck in a hotel again because it was raining everywhere in Virginia. So we decided not to push it too much and just spent the night an hour out of DC in Fredericksburg, Virginia. I was excited to find a nice hotel with free breakfast for only about $65. We still have plenty of time to get to Florida, so we are just going to unwind for a bit and then try to get to bed at a decent time.
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