We're back from our big trip to the east coast! It was so much fun, and so wonderful to see family & friends. We were there for about 10 days, so it will take me a while to blog about it all, which means I'd better get started!
I arrived in D.C. ahead of Alec by about 2 days. My boss scheduled me for a work trip the week before our vacation and the timing didn't really work out for me to fly home from the that and get here by the time we had planned on leaving for the drive out east. So, I flew from here to Alabama, and then from Alabama to Baltimore, where the intrepid M.K. fought Friday-night, holiday weekend traffic to retrieve me. That doesn't really count as Day 1, though, unless you want to hear about planes & airports. I did briefly return "home" to N.C. with a layover in the Charlotte airport!
I count Day 1 as Saturday, October 11.
I got up not-quite bright & early, and after my step-mom-in-law, J. (she really needs a more creative blog nickname) and I enjoyed a cup of morning coffee, she dropped me at the local Metro station so I could ride downtown & meet up with M.K. and her husband E. (yeah, he needs a better nickname, too). We met in the Gallery Place/Chinatown neighborhood, where I was an intern many moons ago at the National Museum of American Art. Boy, has the area changed. The new Verizon Center arena has brought all sorts of new restaurants & shops to the neighborhood and while it does seem to have lost some of the Chinatown character (at least on the main drag) it has a new vibrancy.
In need of some lunch, we decided to walk along 7th St. and see what restaurant struck us. We saw a few good options, and finally settled on a place none of us had ever heard of, Nando's Peri-Peri. It is a restaurant dedicated to my favorite meat, chicken! The menu sounded good, and the decor was intriguingly funky, so we decided to give it a try. As we were placing our order at the counter, M.K. noticed something unusual - a hand-washing station for guests in the center of the restaurant. She studies water sanitation, so she's always noticing those sorts of things! Then, she went to the ladies' room, where she was thoroughly impressed with the automatic faucet & especially the Dyson hand dryers. The manager came to our table just to say hello and of course she had to spend a few minutes praising him for the great facilities. He told us that the faucet doesn't run on a sensor, it actually reacts to the electricity in your body to turns on when you get near it!
Enough about the bathroom! The food was great. I had the Chicken Breast Sandwich with Lemon & Herb sauce. This is their mildest sauce, and it still had a little kick to it. I had mashed potatoes as my side & they were wonderful. E. I think had the chicken wrap. He had the Hot sauce which he said was quite spicy. He had fries on the side & tried a couple of their dipping sauces with them. M.K. had the Butternut Squash and Cous Cous salad, which she really enjoyed. Apparently, our love of this restaurant was well-founded, as the next day it appeared in the Washington Post's Fall dining guide issued by their critic Tom Sietsema! So, if you're in the area, you may want to hold off a few weeks before you try it - restaurants tend to get crowded after he reviews them!
After lunch, we headed over to the National Mall. Our ultimate destination was the National Museum of African Art, but we took a few detours along the way.
First, we wandered through the National Gallery of Art sculpture garden. In all my visits to D.C. I have never actually taken the time to go through it, though I've always meant to. It's a beautiful space. We actually spent more time talking to the guard about his nifty T3 Electric Vehicle than we did looking at the sculpture!
Next, we headed across the Mall toward the African Art museum. We detoured briefly thorough the Mary Livingston Ripley Garden, which I had not previously explored. The museum is located in the Enid A. Haupt garden, so we wandered in there for a bit before entering the museums.
The National Museum of African Art is one of the Smithsonian Museums that I've never been to before. One of my goals for this trip was to try to get off my beaten path and see some things I've never seen. I did manage that to some extent, but also couldn't resist visiting old favorites! I really enjoyed this museum. We saw three exhibitions: one of jewelry, one of textiles and one of various artifacts from the museum's permanent collection. It was especially interesting because M.K. and E. are about to move to the Republic of Congo, so we had a bit of a treasure hunt through the permanent collection looking for items from there. One of the first pieces we saw from the region was a rather scary guy with a spear in one hand and a head in the other! There were a couple of tamer pieces we saw later, though. The museum is also has interesting architecture. It's one of 3 (I think) Smithsonian Museums that are mostly built underground. You enter from the top, then work your way down through the exhibitions.
After the museum, we took a few pictures in the rose garden.
Then, we headed toward Union Station, enjoying the sights and the beautiful weather along the way. We had a good time checking out all the political memorabilia available in the Union Station shops, then had coffee and shared a piece of chocolate cake at a cafe there.
We concluded the day by driving out to the in-laws neck of the woods for a nice visit over Mexican food. All in all, it was a great day!
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