Life After Work: Changes And Kitchenware

Thursday was a day of changed plans. We were going to go to Chesapeake Bay to basically check out a crab shack. But the day dawned grey and foggy again so we decided to take the RAV into the city to visit Arlington National Cemetery and then go for a drive into the countryside.

Arlington Cemetery is a very solemn and moving place to visit. We arrived at about 9:30 and there were already many buses there dropping off classes of kids. Seeing the thousands and thousands of white crosses reminds you of the sacrifices that have been made by so many to safeguard our freedom. There are a lot of famous grave markers, like the Kennedys, but mostly it’s about the thousands of men and women who have died in all of the wars. It is well worth a visit if you are ever in the area.

This is a commemorative quilt honouring people from all 50 states. Each uniform has a childhood picture of an actual soldier lost in battle.

This is John F. Kennedy's family grave site.

We then travelled out into rural Virginia to check out the satellite installation of the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum. It’s near Dulles Airport about 30 minutes from Washington. The museum is a giant hangar filled with over 80 aircraft from the beginning of flight to space vehicles. Some of the more famous planes included the Enola Gay which dropped the atomic bombs on Japan in 1945, the Enterprise space shuttle and assorted Gemini and Apollo capsules. The museum was also in the movie Transformers 3. If you are any kind of a flight nerd, then you have to visit this place. I put it up there with Iberico ham in how impressed I was!

Our next stop was a Premium Outlet Mall in Leesburg, Virginia. We were kind of looking for information on the local wine regions but thought we should check out the stores as well. They had all of the usual clothes and shoe stores but we discovered a Williams Sonoma Outlet where everything we bought was 30% off! And their tax was less! We found quite a few things that we “needed”. It turned out that the wineries were farther away than we thought and I was dubious about wines from Virginia anyway, so we decided to head back to DC for dinner.

This was a mistake. We drove into the city very slowly due to construction. When we got close to where we wanted to be I was almost out of gas and traffic was pretty much gridlocked everywhere. We managed to find gas but everywhere we tried to go was a zoo. There is nowhere to park! Most places in the city don’t seem to have garages so street parking is the norm. After about 2 hours of slowly touring the city, we decided to just come back home to Alexandria to find dinner. We enjoyed a nice walk down to the waterfront area of Alexandria in the summery weather and had pretty much a comfort food dinner. We were going to drive into Georgetown to explore tomorrow but after today’s traffic fiasco, we’ll be using the Metro again!!!