An Evening on the Town

I apologize for my sporadic posts!  I always start out with the best of intentions, but then something else always seems to come up.  I didn't seem to have this trouble in France...!

Anyway, before I get back to Washington DC, I thought I'd share a bit of what's up here.  As is most of the country, our part of the world is experiencing extremely extreme winter weather.  We have had sub-zero wind chills and single-digit temperatures for at least the past week, and last night brought six or so inches of snow, and it's still falling.  The weatherman gleefully told us that snow would not be the problem for long, as 15 to 20 mph winds would blow in this afternoon.  Then drifting snow becomes a problem.  Fabulous.

Strangely enough, the village schools were in session today.  With homeschooling, we're always in session, but it was a bit weird about the public schools, given that every surrounding community closed!  Yikes.

Jeff made it to work a couple hours late, after shoveling out our driveway and giving the road crews a bit of time to clear the main roads.  I think the snowplow has taken a run through our neighborhood, but its effectiveness is limited as long as the snow keeps falling.

In other news, our church and many others in the Peoria area are focusing on fasting for three weeks in January.  I struggled a bit with how to participate in this, as fasting from food doesn't seem overly intelligent 26 weeks into a pregnancy.  So I've given up the computer/internet/email altogether for three days a week.  I don't even turn it on and avoid using my iTouch except to check my calendar.  This has been more of a struggle than thought it would be, which just goes to show that I spend far too much time on it! 

As a result, I find that, on the days I do allow myself on the computer, I end up gorging myself.  So I may add another day next week; we shall see.  So if I don't answer emails right away, that may be why!

Anyway, back to Washington DC...

When we finished up at Arlington Cemetery, we headed up the large boulevard, pictured behind Jeff and Elijah at the end of my last post.  This was a straight shot from the cemetery to the Lincoln Memorial.  It didn't seem to be that far, but man!  I think it took us close to 45 minutes to cross the Potomac and finally arrive to see Mr. Lincoln.

 

Any way you look at him, he surely is impressive.

   

After the Lincoln Memorial, we headed to the Korean War Memorial, where we were lucky enough to catch a "ranger talk," a guided walk of the memorial by a park ranger.  She explained a bit of the history of the Korean War and gave an explanation of the construction and placement of the memorial itself...very interesting.

By the time this talk was over, it was dark.  We had delusions of walking from the Korean War Memorial over to the Jefferson Memorial but quickly nixed this idea when we realized just how far of a walk that actually was.  So we satisfied ourselves with a few scenic shots across the Tidal Basin we would have had to walk around and called it good.  (We never actually made it over to see Mr. Jefferson...that memorial is FAR off the beaten path with no good way to get there.)

At this point, we decided to go take a look at the National Christmas Tree, on the south lawn of the White House.  We meandered by the World War II memorial, which we returned to see in the daylight (under snow) later on in our trip.

And we spent the rest of our sightseeing time this evening looking at the enormous National Christmas Tree and the 56 smaller trees surrounding it, which are decorated by organizations from the 50 states and 6 US territories.  And, boy, are we glad we did this on Friday night.  This park was buried under snow and closed for most of the rest of our time here.  The White House is in the background of the following pictures.

 

We took a picture of the tree from each state where we've lived.  Here is the Illinois tree.

These are the Mississippi and Tennessee trees, respectively.  What you can't well see in these pictures is that they are each decorated differently!

The evening that we visited the National Christmas Tree, the Park Service had a free Santa's Workshop open.  Each family could take a stroll through Santa's workshop and then get one free photo made with the big guy.  While we did make some "this is our tax dollars at work" statements while waiting in line, this ended up being a great souvenir of our evening!  And in Santa's workshop, we were able to see where Jeff fell on Santa's naughty and nice list!

 

When we had seen all there was to see at the National Christmas Tree, we were rather footsore and very hungry.  Charlotte had been asking for Chinese food since we'd landed at the airport, so we plugged that request into Jeff's handy-dandy iPhone restaurant finder.  Thirty minutes later, we were ordering food at the Sichuan Pavilion, a sit-down, order-off-the-menu restaurant on K Street, with nary a buffet in sight.  Fantastic!

Then, we grabbed some breakfast food from a CVS near our hotel and headed back to bed.  We'd had a full first day in Washington DC!

And the next morning?  Washington DC would be transformed into a winter wonderland.