Monday night I went over to his place to chill with his family and eat Chinese food...well, they had Chinese food, I had to bring along my own gluten-free salad and eat that instead. Sigh. It was really nice just to relax, lounge on a couch and talk to him. You end up really missing those little moments when someone's gone for three months.
And then on Tuesday it was ADVENTURE TIME!! About a month ago we decided we wanted to take a little mini-vacation together when he got home, and we chose to go to Washington, DC. So we left Tuesday morning around 8:30, and hit MAJOR traffic...but it was no biggie, we didn't have specifically timed plans so it didn't matter if we got to the city two hours later than planned.
Our first stop was the Smithsonian Zoo!!! We saw pandas, elephants playing with tire swings, flamingos, a baby monkey nursing, an orangutan, an ape, a bunch of other cute little mammals, tons of reptiles, a ridiculous amount of awesome-looking birds, and a statue of a hippopotamus in a pond that I totally thought was real at first...OOPS.
After two hours at the zoo, we drove the hour to the hotel, checked in (I felt like such an adult!!), dropped our stuff off, and then went off to dinner! We went to Outback Steakhouse and it was FANTASTIC. It seriously had the best gluten-free menu I've ever seen at a restaurant. I got Alice Springs Chicken and tried some of David's crab...turns out that even though I don't like seafood, I like crab! A really nice night. :) David wore his Bluecoats polo shirt that day and one of our servers knew what the Bluecoats are! Apparently he marches some indoor circuit and knows a girl who marched this Bluecoats season with David. It was pretty awesome that he got recognition for something most people don't even know exists.
Tuesday morning we got breakfast at the hotel, and they actually had some food out I could eat! Success! Then we checked out, and drove to the Metro station closest to us. We figured out how to work the Metro card pass thingers and then we were off!
We got off at the Smithsonian stop cause the thought was we would do a museum first, but the time we got there it was 11AM and we knew we'd be hungry soon so we decided to hike the 45 minutes to Union Station to get some food. Then after a yummy, but expensive, lunch we hiked back to the National Mall area and toured the Air & Space Museum for about two hours. Instead of doing another museum next, we went to go to see the monuments. ALL the monuments. We walked THE ENTIRE MONUMENT LOOP. So much walking!!!!!!!
I think seeing the monuments was my favorite part of the trip. The architecture and structure themselves are so amazing and then the quotes inside and around all of them are BEAUTFIUL. I was totally English-major geeking out at the word choice and vocabulary and syntax and use of parallelism and and AND! The Franklin Roosevelt one was my absolute favorite. But they were all really impressive and emotional and moving.
After we completed walking the loop, we walked AGAIN to Union Station...we could have taken the metro, but that required transfers and money and it was a nice day and we've done harder things *cough drum corps cough* so we just kept on walking. For dinner I got a salad from Subway, which I didn't know you could do! You just pick your ingredients like you do for a sandwich but they turn it into a salad instead...pretty sweet.
Then we took the metro back to our original metro station, got in the car, and had an awesome drive home. It is so much fun spending hours in a car with someone when you just keep finding things to talk about even though you spent the past 48 hours with them.
Excellent trip. Excellent boyfriend. Excellent to have him back. :)
