Choose Your Own Adventure

Today was our last day in D. C., and I'm sad.  We have enjoyed out time here so much, especially staying at Krissy and Sin's beautiful house.  We feel so at home, and now we have to leave.  At the same time, though, we have covered all the fun things we wanted to do here and more.

We chose to go back to some of the kids' favorite spots to make sure we saw everything they wanted to see.  Freestone gets fixated on things, and one of them was that he wanted to do the flight simulator at the Air and Space Museum.  It's 8 bucks, and 8 times six is 68, and that's not as fun.  So we used another money-saving trick:  only let your favorite children do things that cost money.  I'm just kidding about the favorite child thing, of course, but really, Free was the only one who cared, and Ruby got to go too, because she was paying attention and knew something fun was afoot when the troops divided into two groups.

The rest of the kids toured the Air and Space Museum with Ari as our guide, since she had been there with Scott.  In the spirit of letting the kids choose what they wanted to do, I asked Ptolemy what his favorite thing was.  He chose the escalator.  He didn't give a flying airplane about the Wright Brothers or the actual space ships hanging from the ceiling.  He wanted to ride the escalator.  And then he wanted to ride the elevator.  Without drawing too much attention to ourselves (a pink-haired woman with 4 kids, yeah, right), we went on all of Tamale's favorite rides. :)

The parking situation worked out perfectly for our "favorites" plan.  Two hour parking meter, two hour adventure.  Next up on the list of faves was the Portrait Gallery, one that Scott, Ruby and Ari wanted to see again, and that I missed the first time.  Oh, that we had more time there, but you have to keep moving when you're looking at portraits with six kids.  They were interested, but only up to a point.  Freestone, Scott and I could have spent hours there, but we hastened to the Shake Shack instead.  It was gooood!

 Air and Space, getting on a space shuttle.

 Coco was a stewardess for Pan Am back when stewardesses had to be glamorous and perfect, which she was.  Would Ari and I make the cut??

 I texted Scott this picture and said, "One of these things just doesn't belong."  Ptolemy got in with a group of black school children on a field trip for story time. :)

The pillow I wanted to buy when I allegedly said, "We should paint our room grey and do cherry blossoms."  (foreshadowing!)

 Shake Shack

 Shopping

Next, Ari wanted to go to Forever 21 again.  Snooze, but OK.  On the way back to the car from trying on sunglasses at Forever 21, we noticed, "Hey!  Ford's Theater!  Let's go in!"  I cringe when I write that.  Yes, we went out of our way to go to a store, but failed to note that we were walking by a very famous landmark.  We are flying by the seat of our pants a little bit.  Ford's Theater, which is free and run by U. S. park rangers, was well worth the time.  Did you know it is a working theater to this day?  I didn't.  We could have gone in the house across the street where President Lincoln was taken after he was shot, but I dramatized the story of the shooting and the dying a little too much, and Ptolemy was too freaked out to go in.  Oops.

 Portrait Gallery atrium.  So unique and beautiful!

 The picture I took right before I found out it wasn't allowed to take pictures.

 Reeeeally enjoying a sucker!

The actual spot where Lincoln was sitting when he was shot.

 Made out of pennies.

We thought we were headed home, but the National Cathedral was on the way, and we had been meaning to see it.  Ruby groaned and said, "Hey!  I just got a really good idea!  Let's just go look at the outside of the cathedral because, you know, that's the cool part anyway."  She had seen enough cathedrals for one summer!  That's essentially what we did, because parking at the cathedral is free for the first half-hour.  Is that a challenge?  Of course we can see the National Cathedral in 30 minutes.  That just happens to be how long we have until Tziporah starts chanting, "I getagetagetaout!  I getagetaout!"

The cathedral is much bigger than I had imagined.  We'll have to look it up, because Scott thought it was as big as Notre Dame, but I thought it might be smaller.  And when did someone build a Gothic cathedral here in the U. S.?  When Notre Dame and Chartres and all the others were built, nobody was here except Native Americans.  See, these are the things I would know had I spent more than thirty minutes at the place.

After the whirlwind cathedral tour, we again thought we were going home, since it was approaching dinnertime, but the kids had caught onto the favorites game and Freestone wanted to go back to the zoo to show Scott the rodent with the elephant trunk.  Well, why not, it's free and it's on the way.  (The Kwouns' house is in the perfect location.)  The only thing that isn't free at the zoo is parking.  It's pricey, and Xanthe was tired, so she and I elected to go forage for food while the others watched the zoo animals forage for food.  90 minutes later, I had pizza and Scott had an overview of the National Zoo.  Perfect!

This time, we did go home.  We remarked that it was just late enough to prevent us from being stupid enough to go out again.  Now we're all packed and regretfully readying to leave our temporary paradise.  I wish we could stay!  Real life looms.