Five Years

Five Years is a long time to be married. People will laugh, but it is true. A lot of people don’t make it five years. You add our five years of marriage to five years of dating and that is just genuinely odd. Holly and I have made it a tradition to get out of town to celebrate our anniversary. In recent years we have always celebrated in late March or early April due to a certain Scouting event and its propensity to be on our anniversary of March 15^th. This year we got lucky when I opted out of Twin Arrows due to Eli’s birth. We made the most of it with a trip to Washington D.C.

We left Thursday night with a goal of making it to Nashville and to overnight and catch the 6 am flight to Baltimore on Friday morning. When you are flying free you don’t want to fly on holidays or Spring Break. It is extremely difficult to pull off. We decided to break the golden rule. I had a great plan all worked out until our original flight from Dallas to Houston was delayed due to maintenance. Not good.

We landed in Houston with plenty of time to catch the connection, however; by the time we got to the gate all open seats had been given to other ‘free flying’ passengers. I was not happy as the agent technically gave boarding passes to people below us on the pecking order. Oh well. We quickly changed plans and decided to get to Jackson, Mississippi and overnight there instead. After some frantic calls to my dad and some hotels we canceled our Nashville room and found a hotel in Jackson. The next morning we left Jackson without delay!

We arrived in Baltimore and took a train into DC. This was our first time on a ‘train’. While not a true cross country experience, it was still very exciting for us. Unfortunately on the train is when we learned of Trigger’s death. After some tears and checking in with Eli and the grandparents we arrived at Union Station in DC in time for Lunch.

We stayed at Hotel George right next door to Union Station. It was a nice place, but overpriced for what they billed as boutique hotel. We checked in, scoped out the lay of the land and decided to make an afternoon run to Arlington National Cemetery. Unfortunately our guide said the Cemetery closed at 7pm, when in fact it closed at 5 pm. We wasted a good chunk of time making the run up and back. We decided to see if any tickets remained for a show called Capital Steps. They are a Comedy Troupe that makes fun of political situations. I knew Holly wouldn’t catch a lot of it, but I loved it. She said she enjoyed it and caught a majority of it.

Saturday morning we enjoyed breakfast at the hotel and made our way to the capital. We got our tickets for our capital tour and head to the Library of Congress. It is an absolutely beautiful building. I think my friend Jenise has it right when she says it is the most beautiful interior in DC. After LOC we walked around the capital past the Supreme Court and into the new American Indian Museum. Besides being a great building architecturally, they have a really good cafeteria serving food of native tribes from across the country. We left the Museum and headed over to the Capital for our noon tour. We had an excellent tour guide, which is always a plus. Following our Capital Tour we headed back out to Arlington.

Holly and I both said on our next trip we will allot a greater portion of our trip to Arlington. Besides the obvious, the cemetery is truly a national treasure full of great monuments. We simply did not have enough time to visit what we wanted to with before closing. We did get to see the changing of the guard and laying of the wreath ceremony at the Tomb of the Unknowns, a must. After Arlington we went to Pentagon City for our anniversary dinner at a pub. We left the pub and then took the metro back to the city for a monument tour at night.

I say if you are going to view the monuments in DC, do it at night. Not only are crowds less, but they have a completely different feel at night. Plus they are practically the only thing open 24 hours in DC. Do the daytime only stuff during the day and leave the monuments for later. We visited the Vietnam Memorial, Lincoln Memorial, Korean Memorial, DC WWI Memorial and the WWII Memorial. All amazing. We have to go back to get the other side of the tidal basin!

Sunday we slept in a little and made our way through the rest of the must dos. We started by actually going through the American Indian Museum. We made a quick pass through the Air and Space Museum. We then headed over to the National Archives to view the Bill of Right, Declaration of Independence and Magna Carta, the highlight of the day for sure. We closed our time in DC by eating and partaking at a place called Capital Brewery.

Monday morning we caught an early train back to Baltimore to catch a connecting flight through St. Louis back to Dallas. I headed home and Holly headed to Lubbock to pick up the kid. All in all it was an extremely exhausting, rewarding and active anniversary trip.

Sorry for the long post, but it has to be detailed right? We will post pictures in the next couple of days.