Washington DC- Just Mike and Maria

Mike and I had an amazing trip to the Washington DC area in September for the BSU vs.Virgina Tech football game. A huge thanks to all who helped us make this trip happen- Mom and Dad Barbour, Amanda, Mom and Dad Wyler, and Kurt and Rainey.

We arrived Wednesday night and stayed with Kurt and Rainey in Virgina and had a great time visiting with them. On Thursday we all drove to Colonial Williamsburg. We were there after hours so we were just walking around on our own looking at all of the neat historical sites. Here is the best part...Mike sees a cute little gate and a walk way into a back yard. Mike, myself and Noah head back there to take a look. Mike goes up to the back porch and discovers the back door of the house is open. He looks at me and says "should we go in?" Mind you, we think these are all "museum" like houses because of where we are at. Mike walks in slowly and I am still in the yard. Then I hear "can I help you?" I was a bad wife and I ran... laughing. Turns out it was a private residence! The guy wasn't mad, he says it happens a lot! It was really odd though because you would never think there would be private residences. It was basically a dirt road, no cars, no lights on in the houses, nothing really to indicate people lived there... until we learned that on the front of some of the houses there is a teeny-tiny plaque that says "private residence." You would think they would make it a little more obvious for Idaho tourists like us! One of my favorite parts of Colonial Williamsburg was walking through the church grounds. There were graves from the 1600's. Amazing. You could barely read the stones. Rainey and Kurt live in Fredericksburg, Va, which has amazing history too. Rainey took us to some civil war sites and showed us around Historical Fredericksburg.

The next day we were headed to Busch Gardens. We woke up to pouring rain, UGH. We still had to go though because we had already purchased the tickets and drove a couple of hours to be there, the night before. We headed to K-Mart for an umbrella to make it a little more bearable. There was no one there. We parked right up front at the amusement park - that never happens! We had a couple of things going for us- the weather, and it was a school and work day. It couldn't have turned out better! The rain cleared up after a few hours and we literally walked on to any ride we wanted all day long. It was so much fun!

Mike and I went to Mt. Vernon - the home of President George Washington. It was really interesting and beautiful. This pic is Mike at the bathrooms, which was a separate little building on the side of the house. We like to get pictures of Mike in front of bathrooms for some reason!

In DC we had to eat at Ben's Chili Bowl. Yummy!!

And of course BSU won! We had a great time at the game.

We took a tour of the Capitol Building. This picture of Mike is in the center of the building where all of the President's stand as they exit out to be sworn in as President.

We visited the Library of Congress, Arlington National Cemetery, The Supreme Court, The National Archives, and The Museum of Natural History. We packed a ton of stuff into this trip and were so exhausted - but we had a great time!

Were gone over a week and ready to be home- and then our flight gets delayed. That caused us to miss our connecting flight, so we were stuck in San Francisco for the night. That may have been fun, but we didn't get to our hotel until around midnight and had to be back at the airport at 5am. I missed my kids, but it was great to have a little break and spend some time with just Mike.