Vacation

Well, you know what they say about the best intentions....in any case, since the last post, we've obviously gone on vacation, which was fantastic.

We left a bit early to do a quick tour of D.C. - everything worked out well. God Bless the internet, where we used Hotwire to get a prime hotel (Capital Hilton, about 2 blocks from White House) and to book our tour bus package. We set out early on Friday, and drove about 7 hours to get to our hotel. I have to say I was VERY happy with Ava in the car...I was anticipating lots of whining, and endless "are we there yet" questioning, but she hardly made a peep, at least until we were off the freeway and into D.C. proper. Granted, it was a bit hard to get her to go to sleep when we were still awake in the same room, but once we put a sleep mask on her, she was out like a light. We had really nice weather for Saturday, our main tourist day.
We got tickets on the open top double decker bus, which did a huge loop around the major sites, and featured hop-on, hop-off access, which was very nice. Casey has been known to strangle tour guides who attempt to keep him captive or restrain his movements in any way, so I felt the flexibility to plan our own tour was far safer than a more traditional tour. Plus the tickets were good for two days, so that worked out as well. Of course in the entire two days, no one ever asked to see our tickets - if we had only known.


We hit a place that looked fun from the bus, Harry's, or some such place, which was a touch seedy, on the ground floor of an obviously very seedy hotel. Thankfully, as we've morphed into ancient early-bird-special types, we were done early enough to skip out before the place became downright frightening, and crashed hard at the hotel. Sunday, we set out for the Glorious Outer Banks. Will do second post for that one - whenever I do a really long posting, something goes wrong, and I wind up having to do the whole thing over...