Jip here. Since I didn't take any leave over the Christmas holidays, I took a few days this weekend to have a mini vacation with the family to Washington, D.C. I was off on Friday and after school got out, we took off, headed for the District. Luckily, we avoided major traffic jams, closed tunnels, and several accidents (I-95 can be very unpredictable -- luckily the accidents were on the opposite side of the highway) to get to our hotel near Tyson's Corner.
After a night of quasi-rest in the hotel, we took off on Saturday headed to the Bethesda area to watch a production of Beauty and the Beast at the Imagination Stage. No photography was allowed once the show started, but here are photos of the stage and of the kids standing in front of some character renditions. Also, we've included the obligatory family selfie (felfie).
The acting and singing were very good, and we enjoyed the show immensely. Now, if we could just get both kids to *want* to go watch stage performances more often vice *wanting* to watch their iPads....
After the show, we owed the kids some hotel pool time (I think they were more excited about the pool than anything else). Sorry, no photos of the pool or us (it was nothing to write home about anyway) but after a quick dip and some dinner, it was time for a movie. We watched Sing at the Tyson's Corner theater and then headed back to the hotel for some R and R. Here's a photo of the kids in front of a large Lego figure advertising the new Lego Batman Movie coming out soon.
Sunday was the Mosman clan at the National Mall day. First, we hit up one of my favorite museums ever -- the Smithsonian National Museum of American History. I could easily spend an entire day, or week, in there reading all the signs and appreciating our diverse and fantastic history. One of the first displays we viewed was of Fort Collins, by the way. It was all about renewable energy and even had a thing on New Belgium Brewing, but I digress.
We started out hard and went immediately into the Draper Spark Lab. RJ tackled the Lego/robotic challenge to build an artificial hand and Ryleigh designed some clothes. Both kids played with the Design Your Own Button display, and Ryleigh also went next door to play in a play area. Outside the Spark Lab, the kids enjoyed playing with old Macintosh computers which were set up to design "new" icons. We wandered through the old steam machines and cars and boats and electrical power machines, etc. It was fun, but since the kids weren't stopping and reading each sign, it went fairly quickly.
After the kids wore themselves out by walking around the museum (Amy and I were not much better off), we decided that we'd skip the long walk to the Washington Monument. We jumped back in our car, avoided the inauguration rehearsals, drove over near the monument and voila!, found a parking spot withing a short distance from the base of the obelisk. When we got to the monument, we did our best lemming impression and followed exactly what everyone else was doing -- taking photos of their feet while looking up.
And, of course, we had the obligatory felfie. Yes, that's my forehead poking into the side of the photo.
We stayed one more night in the hotel and drove back today (MLK Day) to Virginia Beach. It was a nice little vacay. I'm off one more day until I go back to work, but the kids have school tomorrow, so it'll be a day of kid-less errands and being productive...hopefully.
Have a great week!
-Jip
