May Part 8

Thursday, May 30

I put cash onto my metro pass because I was almost out, and this is the change I got back.  I felt like I kind of jingled the rest of the day.  Ha ha!  I thought I spent the Sacajawea coins and kept the presidents, but I must have gotten mixed up, because I only came home with one president, the silver dollar, and a few others.  Darn!  When does one even see these anymore?!  I guess they do at the metro in DC. 

All the metro stations have these big canopies over them and escalators going down.  You go in and swipe your card and the gate opens for you, and then when you come out it deducts however much it costs to get where you went.  Each station has it all figured out.  Anyway, kind of fun.  You can see the two scooters sitting there on the left, waiting for someone to take them for a ride.

We got to the river early, so we looked around.  We were actually about an hour early!  Here are fire and police boats!

Here's our boat - Spirit of Mount Vernon.  Just a little cruise ship.

Some other boats

We each got 4 tickets: one for the trip there, one for breakfast along the way, one for entry to Mount Vernon (which we later swapped for a real ticket at Mount Vernon), and one for the trip back.

 Fire boats up a little closer.  Yes, they do fascinate me!

This is a water taxi.  They come and go pretty regularly up and down the Potomac, and they were definitely faster than our boat!

Breakfast was yummy!  

I got a waffle and put syrup on it and then wished I hadn't because it was sweet enough without it.  It was good, though.  and some potatoes and bacon and a sausage and a pastry.  The sausage wasn't stellar, but everything else was pretty good, especially those pastries.  I thought they'd be apple flavor, but I couldn't ever decide what flavor they were supposed to be.  They were buttery and yummy, though.  Jeremy got eggs instead of a waffle.  We both got cranberry juice.  Yum!!!

Those people on the right stole our spot! ;) Seriously, though, if I'd had my purse I'd have left it there and then they'd have known.  Ha ha!  It's OK.  

The trip was nice.  It was kind of slow, but every now and then a guy would come on the intercom and tell us about the things we were passing.  I liked that.

There was a lady who was on her 30th anniversary trip.  Her husband was up one level from us, but she didn't want to be out in the sun, so she came down and talked to us.  She said they were married on May 7 just like us, but 10 years earlier.  She said they never had any kids, but they had lots of dogs, and she sponsored a child in, I think, Mexico, who is now in college.  She was kind of fun to talk to.  After a while she moved further toward the front and fell asleep.  Jeremy fell asleep.  I couldn't sleep and just wished I had a book!

There were lots of big estates along the river.

See the nest on the buoy? There's a kind of water bird that likes to build their nests there.  I know they're not pelicans or seagulls, but I can't remember what they are.  There's not one in this next anyway.  Maybe they're really ospreys and not really water birds hardly at all.

Mount Vernon from a distance

We got up and hiked up toward the mansion because we had a tour scheduled there.  I had forgotten my sunscreen again that morning, so I was really worried, but there was a lot of shade!

Cherry tree

Sheep

Pig

The mansion from the back

One of the coolest thing about Mount Vernon was all these signs.  Most of them had a quote from George Washington at the top.  He sure wrote in his journal a lot!

This has got to be holly, right?

We tried to get in line, but a youth group came, so we were told to go look at something else for a minute before getting back in line.  I think they said this was the slave quarters, or at least a rebuilt version of it.  On the far left end of that there's a little gift shop.  I had money burning a hole in my pocket, and I'd wanted to buy a book on the trip, and I kind of wanted something to read on the boat trip back to DC anyway, so I bought two books there, along with a fan for Jill's birthday and a pen for Jeremy.  Jeremy got more postcards to send home and filled them out on the boat later.

There were lots of flowers all over the place.

Here's when we were back in line.  The mansion looks like it's made of sandstone, but it's not.  It's wood that's beveled all around, and then they painted it, and then threw sand on the wet paint to make it look like stone.  They're in the process of removing all of everything off the exterior wood and redoing the whole process.

One bit of history I learned - George Washington didn't have any kids.  Martha had some nephews that she and her husband raised, but they died young.  Washington willed the property to his nephew in the end.  After a long time it was falling into ruin.  There was originally a LOT more land that belonged to the estate.  Eventually, the Mount Vernon Ladies' Association bought the place to take care of it.  They sold off most of the land, and they lovingly have taken care of what's left ever since.  They accepted no government or local funding, which is smart, because then they didn't have to give up any controlling interest in it.  They have restored a lot of things and rebuilt others.

Another cool thing - George Washington loved the view of the river and the trees on the other side that he had from the front of his house, and so it became important for the locals to preserve that.  Years ago people were thinking of building across the river from Mount Vernon, but the locals didn't like that, so they bought all the land themselves and donated it to the government to make a park.  It has hiking trails and such, and so the view is pretty well preserved.

Washington was really clever and knew so much about so many kinds of things.  He also had great taste in landscaping, and he liked to play as big a role as he could in all that went on within his land.  He owned like 58,000 acres altogether.  He even had a grist mill and a brewery.  We didn't make it over to see those, though.  Anyway, having the right man to do each job was really important to him.  He wanted people who would do as good a job as he would have and had some really specialized workers, whether slaves or paid workers.

Mansion on the left with the scaffolding.  Other buildings ahead. ;)

You can see here that the paint is getting old and cracked and ready to fall off in places.

I bet someone was working here.

This is the servants' house, and it's also where the servants of visitors stayed.  

You can barely see to the right of the fireplace there are a bunch of fire buckets all lined up.  They say Washington on them.

View from waiting in line to go in.

Looking off to the left

View from the front of the house 

The first room we came into is called the "new room," I guess because it was the newest.

The best thing about the mansion tour was these tour guides standing around.  They told the history of every room and different parts of the house.  They knew the answers to all our questions too.  They said that only about 40% of the furnishings in the house are originals.  The harpsichord isn't the one that was originally there, but they did have one.  The original is in storage.

This hallway was stripped down like this.  I bet they're mid-restoration.

This is one of those old mirrors.  It's all tarnished with age.

The house was originally built by Washington's dad, and it included this room, the blue and green rooms, and similar ones on the opposite wall.  Washington inherited it from his half brother, and he built on.  He added stairs to this room and added a third floor too.

See the pretty banister?  Washington put that in.

Front parlor

Dining room

They told us they have no record of who stayed in what bedroom, but we do know which one Washington and his wife shared.  It wasn't this one, though.  They were important people and received many visit.  They had hundreds of visitors over the course of each year they lived there.

This is George and Martha's bedroom.  He called it Martha's room, and he didn't even dress in there.  He'd go down to his study and get dressed in a closet there.  When he died she locked this room and moved up a floor to a different bedroom (from the second floor to the third), until she died like 2 1/2 years later.

This is his study!  See that chair with the weird thing hanging over it?  That's a fan chair.  You sit in it and pump the foot pedals and it blows on you.  It might make you hotter from exertion, but sure!  High technology! ;)

Still in the study, in case you wondered.

Dining room again.  They had the kitchen in a separate building so as to not heat up the whole house with the cooking.

Here's the kitchen.

Check out the different sizes of fire pokers on the rack above the fireplace.

Meat locker off the kitchen 

That was the end of the mansion tour and we were set free to explore whatever.  This is the smokehouse.

Wash house

This wasn't Washington's, but it's pretty.

The stable looked like any old stable.  I just thought it was interesting that he broke all his own horses.

Then we went down to the old family vault.  Washington was buried here first, but he'd always wanted a newer one to be built because this one was starting to fall apart.

 Some monuments outside the new family vault

This one talks about Washington's nephew who inherited the estate.  He was a good, honorable judge, it says.

The new vault 

George is on the right, and Martha is on the left.  That black square is how you get to the other family members buried there.

This is at the old slave burial grounds.  There were no markers, and it sounds like they were kind of buried helter-skelter.  But the Mount Vernon Ladies' Association eventually made two monuments there.  This is the newer one.

This is the older one.

 Washington and his wife owned hundreds of slaves.  Washington freed most of his at his death, and the rest were supposed to be freed when Martha died, but some never were.

Down the hill from the mansion is this place that used to be a marsh, but then the military built this sea wall, and now it's all dry.  So now it's used to demonstrate some of the techniques that Washington used.

They had sheep here.  I like this zig-zag fence pattern.  They had a little spot where they showed all the kinds of fences he used and what each kind was for.

 Here's Jeremy and some cool old buckets and the seawall.

A boat

 You can see more boats standing on their sides in the back here.

See that kind of round house in the back?  It was for grain treading.  It was 2 stories tall.  The top floor had gaps in the floor slats.  The land sloped up to the top floor door there in the front.  They would throw grain in the top floor and lead in the horses to tramp around in there, and that would loosen the grain from the plants and it would fall through the slats, and then they could go into the first floor in the back and gather it up.  This was Washington's idea.  He was pretty clever.

They had this little garden spot with hemp, flax (shown here), and a bunch of other things.

Here's a representation of a slave house.  Small and snug.

Mini root cellar

After that we took a trail up and around in a wooded area.  Along the way were these little informative things about local plant uses and whatnot.

Also, there was a visitor center by the gate where everyone who came by land came in. It was full!  I wanted to go see Washington's teeth, but there was another youth group swarming around, and we couldn't get through, and it was almost time to be back to the boat anyway.  The boat had gone back to DC and picked up more people before coming back for us.  We had about 3 hours at Mt. Vernon and didn't quite see all of it.  Like I said, we didn't see the grist mill or brewery, and we didn't find the blacksmith shop or a few other things.  Anyway, this head is in the visitor center, and it's weird!  It looks like it's made of plastic, and it's set back in the wall.  However they made it, It looks like his head turns to watch you as you go past.  It's kind of creepy!

There was this sailboat with its sails down, just sitting out on the water.

This is the dock.  We sat and played Pokemon Go while we waited for the boat to come.

There it is!

And here we are docked again in Washington DC, leaving the boat.  I tried to read on the ride back to DC, but I was too tired, so I laid my head on my hands at the table there, but I wasn't tired enough to fall asleep like that.  Ha ha!  But it was quite picturesque anyway.

After that we wanted to go to the National Archives and see the Constitution.  So we walked back to the metro station and rode to the Archives stop.

When we came out of the metro station it was POURING rain!  We stood in a kind of window well for a while.  It was pretty in the rain, though. 

People all over the city drive these that either are or look like carry-ons.  Some are used like briefcases.  This girl may have been heading to the airport or something.  You never know.

Here's the Trump Hotel from the front.

The rain let up a bit, so we ran to the Archives where there was a door open, but they told us the museum is actually on the other side!  We walked through all the puddles all the way around, and just as we got there another stinking youth group swarmed in.  (Why even bring them?!  They're not really old enough to appreciate what they're looking at.  That and all they want to do at that age is flirt while standing directly in front of whatever you're trying to look at.)

So we took our soggy selves through security again.  There were kids all over the place!  All kinds of different groups.  We couldn't take pictures in the Archives, but that's OK.  We're happy to help preserve those precious documents!  The first thing we saw there was the Magna Carta.  Jeremy has now seen 2 of the four originals of that document.  He saw the other one in England.  This one was written in beautiful handwriting in old English.

Then we found our way to the room that houses the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights.  It was SO FULL!  I barely got a glimpse of the Declaration of Independence.  Jeremy waited around until he got to look a little better.  It's very faded.  I got a better look at the other two documents.  The Constitution is so beautiful!  Such gorgeous handwriting!  And I got a good look at the Bill of Rights too. It was neat.  There were lots of other documents around the room too, but I can't remember much about those.

And then we walked through more puddles all the way back to that pen store and it was open!  It is such a cool place!  Jeremy got some dark green ink and a nice fountain pen.  He offered to get me something, but I have a hard enough time holding onto the BIC pens I get.  Kids are always stealing my pens!  Ha ha!

And then we went back to the hotel.  This is the shopping bag form Jeremy's pen and ink.

This and half of that loaf of bread are all that was left of our food for the week.  That plastic container is chicken that we bought the first day.  It was like chicken strips, breaded.  It was OK, but it had like coconut or something in the bread.  It would have been better warm.  We had peaches and also corn with peppers and onions (delicious!).  It ended up with too much food and couldn't finish it all.  We had cherries on Wednesday night and grapes on Thursday.  Yum!

This is part of my dinner from Thursday.  Pepper jack on the bottom, cheddar next up and on top, and colby jack between the two cheddars.  I liked the cheddar best!  That surprised me a bit.  I took this picture because I thought it was so funny how big the piece of bread too.

We got up early and took an Uber ride to the airport.  Our plane out of Washington DC and the one out of Chicago were both on time.  We ate a bit of pizza in Chicago.  It was funny because we'd already made it through one flight and still nobody at home would be awake yet.

When we arrived in Tucson we asked around and found the stop for the parking shuttle.  While we were waiting this kid sat down and started playing his ocarina.  He played some Legend of Zelda songs and songs from movies too.  He was pretty good, and I loved it!

And then we drove home to our kiddos.  We gave everyone their gifts and took pictures, and then we went swimming for a bit, and then Henry fell asleep on the couch next to me.

It is good to be home, but I really miss Washington DC.  Jeremy says I didn't snore at all while we were there.  We weren't allergic at all, and I really didn't mind the humidity.  I would love to go back and take our children to live there.  They are less enthusiastic about that idea. ;)

Either way, I'm really glad we got to go.  It was wonderful seeing all those things and kind of letting go of all my worries for a week.  Coming back home, my worries feel different on my shoulders.  I guess I feel different too.  It was really nice being just the two of us for a bit.  I think it's important that we did that.  It was important to celebrate these 20 years together, to celebrate us.  I'm just so glad.