DC and the Smithsonian......sort of

First of all, I have to say I have been looking forward to this forever.

It would have been great but it was not. It was a 2.5 hour drive to get there. No big deal.....but once we got there (and we drove right to it) it took over another hour to find a place to park. NO spaces, lots full and at one point we ended up at Regan National Airport asking how to get out of Regan National Airport. We saw others making really dangerous U-turns because evidently THEY were also lost.....but I digress. Eventually we did find a parking space with a meter. A 2 hour meter. Well we could come back out and feed it again....ooops guess what? NO change. We got together about a dollar but that only got us 15 minutes. No kidding. So I did the fast walk into one of the closest museums only a block away, got searched, had to walk down several flights of stairs, the thru what turned out to be the coolest part of the trip.....moving sidewalks thru a tube like tunnel with little white lights......that led to the food area where a very nice woman gave me what I thought would be enough to get us the 2 hour limit. I fast walked all the way back to the car, fed another $3 into the meter and got a total of 1 hour and 45 minutes. Its by this time raining.....grab the umbrella...... F...It. Lets go.....we walked about another 4 blocks to the right museum.......and I learned a few things. First of all I learned I still dislike rubbing elbows with the unwashed masses. I love people. You know I do......but loud mouth, stroller pushing rude parents of misbehaved snot nosed rude children I do not enjoy. People were sneezing and coughing right and left and if I did get close to one of the exhibits I was excited to see, there was so much filth on the glass I could scarcely see. I saw the Hope Diamond for about 3 seconds and even it looked dirty......I did see some 20carat natural yellow diamonds I did like.....earrings. Beautiful but I had to push a kid out of the way to see them.........then put my elbows out to block his siblings. For some reason their mother thought it necessary to talk at the top of her lungs about inane things but showed absolutely no stress about her three snotty nose miners.

I could not wait to get the hell out of there. Who knew I was such a snob? My friend Penny had a friend who used to tie her kids arms to the high chair when she fed them so they would stay cleaner. I used to thing that was pretty severe but now I think how many fewer boogers would end up on places YOU have to touch if we did this more often especially in public places. I think we should consider this as a new law.

The good news is we found an Uno Chicago Grill and had some great pizza tho our waitress was Bi=Polar (she told us this upfront) and would not stop talking to us....tho she did say she thought I looked 40 so she must have something going for her!

When we went to Jamestown, one of the skeletons was out to loan to....you guessed it The Smithsonian so we got to see it......and you know they are right...you see one really skinny guy....you have seen them all.

So Barry took this shot of the Capitol Dome from his rear view mirror. I did like driving around seeing the sites from my airconditioned car. It was 90 degrees. You cant get close enough to the White House to see it from a car.....THANKS terriorists.

Anyway we ran into some really serious weather on the way home....some trees down and scary straight winds.....and really interesting clouds.