Oct. 26 The Country Bumpkins and the Big City

Monday morning started with another amazing meal provided by Tom and Tena and then we headed south to the campground to join up with Chuck and Marlyn and Jim and Paula (unfortunately for them, they didn't have quite as good of breakfast).
From there we found the metro station and tried to figure out how to buy our tickets, how to go through the turnstiles, retrieve our tickets, maneuver the transport chairs through the turnstiles and to an elevator or up the escalator, find the right train, figure out the right stop, discover where we were when we came up from the metro station in Washington DC, find bathrooms, find the trolley stop, figure out where to eat... Luckily for us there were many kind and helpful people to assist us as we went along! We took the Old Town Trolley and had a tour of the monuments and federal building with narration of interesting facts as we went along. We took another trolley to Arlington Cemetery. Unfortunately, we got to it late enough in the day so that we weren't able to get off and actually see the main sites (JFK's grave and the eternal flame, Tomb of the Unknowns, etc.). It was still an interesting tour, just a bit disappointing. We then got to go to the Lincoln Memorial, the WWII Memorial and look up so many of our family who served in the war, the Korean Memorial and the Vietnam Memorial. By this time it was getting late and we hoofed it seven block to the nearest metro station to head back toward Baltimore.

On the Metro

Washington Monument 

The trees were beautiful! 

The White House 

Jefferson Memorial 

 Arlington  Cemetery

Mr. Lincoln 

The Aldrich Contingency  

Jim and Aunt Colene with Flat Stanley (for her great-grandson) at the Korean Memorial 

WWII Memorial 

And the moon is rising! 

Vietnam Memorial

Charles Erwin was from Lamont and in my graduating class. He was killed in Vietnam a year after we graduated.  

We were hungry when we go back, so headed to what looked to be an easy/short distance to an IHOP. Our GPS said that we had arrived, but we couldn't find it! This turned into quite a circus involving many u-turns, and after finally finding it, getting onto the interstate when we thought that we were turning into the parking lot for it, losing Chuck and Marlyn completely, Joe and Darlene and the Aunts getting to it and ordering while David and I and Jim and Paula were still trying to figure out where we were. It was one of those "you just had to be there" situations. Chuck and Marlyn ended up having a "date" and eating by themselves. We were really kind of lost for a bit but ended up driving past the metro station that we had just left 20 minutes earlier and retraced our path to get to the IHOP for a late supper. It was such a silly situation that we couldn't stop laughing.

Zombie attack at IHOP