Wrapping up Washington

Happy Valentine’s Day!  I hope that you’ve had a good one.  For my Valentine’s gift, Jeff bought tickets to watch a Peoria Rivermen hockey game on Friday night, followed by a NeedToBreathe concert…lots of fun!

Before I get back to our final afternoon in Washington DC, I thought I’d catch you up on life here at Chez Wilkes.

The latest big-ticket breakdown around here is our two-month-old hard drive.  Evidently, we got one with a defective mother board that finally played out on Tuesday night.  Jeff had hooked it up on Tuesday for the first time since the flood, and it had worked fine.  On Wednesday, when I tried to turn it on to access some scrapbooking stuff, none of the peripherals were getting any power.  Jeff messed around with it when he got home, with the same results.

When Jeff called technical support, the guy basically told him that we would have to take the hard drive to Best Buy because he couldn’t trouble shoot it over the phone.  So, yesterday, that’s what we did.

The Geek Squad told him that the mother board was defective.  As the hard drive was still under warranty, the good news was that we could basically pick any computer in the store to replace it, or Best Buy could issue store credit.  The bad news was that data recovery was not included in the warranty; we could either pay Best Buy $100 to recover it for us, or they would just wipe the drive before sending it back to the manufacturer.  Or we could take it home, remove the hard drive ourselves, and thereby void the warranty.

Fantastic.  The best news is that the only information on the hard drive that isn’t anywhere else (old hard drive, laptop) is a bunch of scanned items that I planned to scrapbook.  I can always rescan that stuff when our printer/scanner is hooked back up.  We opted for the store credit and ordered a new hard drive this afternoon.

As one friend asked us, what’s next?  A car?

On the bright side, the oven repairman comes on Tuesday afternoon.  I will be very glad to have a functioning oven again.  Cooking with the microwave, stove top, and crock pot is getting difficult.

On the frustrating side, the insurance adjuster has not only not contacted us, but is also markedly ignoring the messages that I am leaving for him.  I guess that he’ll get to us when he gets to us.

Ah, well.  Things could always be worse.

As far as our last afternoon in Washington…when we finished up at the White House, we decided to walk over to the Vietnam War Memorial before going back to pick up our stuff at the museum.  As with everything else, it was covered in snow, but some organization had set up a Christmas tree in its corner, which was covered with thank-you messages from an elementary school.  It was neat.

Afterwards, we walked by the World War II Memorial and the Washington Memorial, trying hard not to fall down on the ice.  Then we picked up our stuff at the American History Museum and grabbed a bite to eat in one of the cafeterias there.  We hit a few highlights, including the original Star Spangled Banner, before heading back over to Capitol Hill.

Once there, we visited the Library of Congress and the Supreme Court building.  While we bypassed guided tours of both places, the architecture and beauty of the buildings made stopping by worthwhile.  The Library of Congress has one of the original Gutenberg Bibles, which was was neat to see.  Both buildings were also decorated for Christmas, as were all of the federal buildings.

Here are some photos of the Library of Congress…

 

…and some of the Supreme Court building.

 

These buildings are designed to look thousands of years old, but the Library of Congress is just over a century, and the Supreme Court was built in the 1930’s.  I find this all kind of funny, since our government was looking for a break from how things were in the Old Country.

After we finished looking around the Supreme Court, we rode the Metro back to our hotel to retrieve our bags and then headed for the airport.  Our flight was supposed to leave at 7:30 p.m., and we wanted to give ourselves plenty of time.  Because of the snowstorm over the weekend, travel was still backlogged, and we didn’t want to run any risk of being bumped because we checked in late.

Of course, a new bad weather system was moving into Chicago, and earlier flights there had already been cancelled.  This added to the number of people being crammed into later flights.  Nevertheless, we arrived, cleared security, and took a seat at the gate.  This was not destined to be the easy trip we had getting there!

We ended up eating supper at the airport and trying not to get frustrated at all the delays.  Finally, our flight boarded about ninety minutes late, and we were headed home.

Our original plan was to get to Chicago by 8:45, drive the three hours home, and be in bed around midnight.  The actual series of events included not arriving in Chicago until 10:30, waiting 20 minutes for the shuttle to our car, and hitting the road in freezing-rain-slippery conditions shortly before midnight, which got us home between 2:00 and 3:00 a.m. on Christmas Eve.  Whew!

And that finally brings me to the end our Washington DC trip, nearly two months after the fact.

Have a good one!