Apr 4th 2007
After what seemed like a very long day I finally made it home from work. I was fretting about washing my new car which was covered in the awful yellow pollen. When I got home Jen was already home too. She wasn’t feeling that great. Come to think of it I wasn’t feeling that great too - I think it’s allergies.
We had some leftovers for dinner and then went out to the nearby gas station to get my car washed in the dinky little automatic car wash thing. In front of us in the car wash was a big H2 Hummer. It looked really funny inside the little car wash thing. Afterwards Jen and I went to Publix to do some shopping. When we got home I paied some bills and did some administrative stuff. Before bed I helped Jen flip the mattress and make the bed with the new sheets.
I pretty boring evening.
Apr 3rd 2007
Jen met me at home at about 5:30pm. We drove up to my Mom & Jim’s house for dinner. On the way we stopped at the Crackerbarrel off of Delk road to drop off the audiobook from our 12-hour road trip on Sunday. It was raining very heavily outside and I got soaked just going from the car to the restaurant.
At Mom’s house we had dinner. It was really nice. We had some terrific appetizers, grilled steaks, salmon, veggies, salad, and desert.
Apr 2nd 2007
After getting home from work today Jen and I opened a bottle of wine. It was the 2004 Nomade Malbec - it wasn’t that good.
There was no game night tonight. I processed photos from our recent trip to DC and made a photo album.
Apr 1st 2007
We woke up extremely early again today at 4:30am. After catching a taxi to the airport, we checked-in and headed to the gate. The first flight out to Atlanta at 6am was oversold and they were looking for volunteers to give up their seats. This didn’t bode well. The same thing happened for the next four flights. It was turning out to be a pretty bad travel day.
I used my cell phone to check flight information and things didn’t look good. Basically it looked as if we would not be getting to Atlanta by plane today. So we bit the bullet and decided to drive. We rented a car from National (no Avis like we would normally do because they were all sold out). Most of the car rental companies were getting sold out. For some reason it was turning out to be a very bad weekend for travel.
So Jen and I began the lengthy 12-hour drive to Atlanta. This is the first time in my nine years of traveling that I’ve had to drive to get home. We didn’t wait until tomorrow because Jen really needed to get to work on Monday.
Shortly after we began our drive we stopped at a Cracker Barrel to rent an audiobook for the drive. We rented ‘The Thirteenth Tale‘ by Diane Setterfield. It was pretty good and made the time go by very quickly. We also stopped at a staples to buy a USB car charger to charge our cell phones. And we also stopped for dinner at a little Mexican place I think somewhere in Virginia. It was mediocre.
Jen actually drove the bulk of the time. She’s a real champ! We finally got home at about 2am and went to bed. Before going to bed I checked the rest of the flights from DCA to ATL and saw that we did the best thing by driving - we would not have made it out today.
Mar 31st 2007
Today was a great day! We woke up at 4:30am, grabbed our backpacks and headed down to the airport. We checked-in with no problem and made the first flight out to DC which went wheels-up at 7:20am. Jen and I sat in 10C & 10D - the best row in coach! It was a nice flight. I had Jen look over the restaurant research I did yesterday so she could pick out a place for lunch and dinner.
We made it into DC with no problem. This time we didn’t have to change our clothes because we were in coach class and were wearing jeans and tennis shoes. We bought a day-pass for the metro and took the train to the Smithsonian stop. We walked over to the Washington Monument. It was awesome weather outside today. The skies were a deep blue and it was very pleasant out. It appeared that some people were flying lots of kites - probably in relation to the festival. I took some photos of the area.
(Washington Monument)
Next we headed over to the tide pool. There were white cherry blossoms everywhere. It was awesome! We walked the circuit of the pool. Naturally there were a lot of people and many more as the day went on. We stopped at a grove of pinker cherry trees as well as the Jefferson memorial. I had not seen the Jefferson memorial before.
(Jen at the tide pool)
(White cherry blossoms)
(Jen looking happy)
(Another view of the tide pool)
(Pink cherry trees)
(Our ritual: photograph of our feet for every trip)
(Jefferson memorial)
By this time Jen wanted some coffee and we couldn’t find a coffee shop nearby (this was before I had the iPhone) so we decided to get some lunch and hopped on the metro and went toDupont Circle. The place we went to for lunch was closed so we chose another place from our list: an Italian bistro place. We sat outside on the patio and it was so nice. It was so pleasant outside I couldn’t have asked for anything better. We had a great lunch!
After lunch we went to a nearby Starbucks for Jen to get her coffee fix. And then we went back to the metro and made our way to the Smithsonian stop again. It wasuber crowded by this point and we ducked into the castle to get a map. Based on our map we decided to go to the Air and Space museum. It was, of course, really crowded. We didn’t stay there long but before we left we saw an upcoming commercial aviation exhibit under construction which should be really cool. I can’t wait to see that.
Next we went to the metro and headed to the Renwik museum. It wasn’t as good as I remembered from last time but nice nonetheless. After that we took the metro to Union Station and from there walked across the street to the Postal Museum. It was in a brand-new building and mostly empty. About half of the postal museum was dedicated to how proud the postal service is of junk mail - excuse me, I mean ‘direct mail’. It was quite disturbing actually.
After the postal museum we went to Dupont Circle for an early dinner. We went to an unassuming tiny Polynesian place where we had some wonderful appetizers. I had chicken like ‘General Tsos’ but different. Jen had a huge soup. Following dinner we went to a wine bar to have a glass of wine. It wasn’t as good as I would have liked.
Finally we took the metro to the courthouse stop and walked over to the Hilton Garden Inn, checked in, took a shower, and went to bed. It was a very long day with a lot of walking and we were both quite exhausted.
I’ve been wanting to go to DC to see the cherry blossom festival for several years now, so it was great to finally be able to do it.
Mar 30th 2007
I did a little research on activities for our trip to DC tomorrow and found some good food reviews. I concentrated on the Georgetown and Dupont circle area. After work I went home and then drove up to a bowling place off of Cobb parkway near Dobbins AFB to meet Jen for a work-related social event.
I bowled with her, her co-worker Lisa, and her boss Viktoria. Lisa’s husband Chris arrived too. We all bowled a few games. It was pretty fun but I’m not too good at bowling. Lisa and Chris made arrangements to have dinner with Jen and I at Thai Diner. I love that place so I was pretty excited to be able to go there.
Once we got over there we had to wait about twenty minutes for a table. Jen had the spicy basil fried rice and I had the pad thai with tofu. It was all extremely good food. Thai Diner is my favorite Thai place!
Mar 29th 2007
Today we had our book club meeting hosted by Lisa. This month’s book was ‘Microserfs‘ by Douglas Coupland. I personally liked this book quite a bit. The book club wasn’t a bit turnout. It was just Jen, me, Katie, Chris, Lisa, and Alan. Alan has a gigantic fish tank that he showed us. We had a decent time and by the time we went home I was pretty tired.
