Travelin' Man, part one

All right, all right, already! I'm finally feeling somewhat human, after my weeklong jaunt through New York and Washington D.C. Really, it's taken me until today to finally feel caught up on my sleep. But, that's not to say it wasn't, as I advertised to the parents of the kids going, "a trip of a lifetime," because it really was. Truly, one of the best times I've ever had - the only way it would have been better is if Katrina could have come along, too. That's in the works for next year's trip, by the way.

Our basic itinerary was as follows:

June 24: Depart PDX for La Guardia via Atlanta, 9:55 PM

June 25: Arrive in New York City, meet up with tour guide and motorcoach. We had these really nice deluxe buses took us everywhere during the trip - reclining seats, bathroom in the back, big picture windows - too cool.
That day, we visited:
The Empire State Building (went up to the observation deck)
Times Square
Rockefeller Center (had lunch at a little Italian pizza place - yum!)
Central Park
5th Avenue (we cut the kids loose here to shop for a couple hours)
Then, that night, we all got dressed up and walked from our hotel, the Edison (West 47th and Broadway) to see "The Lion King" - simply the most amazing production I've ever seen on stage.

June 26:
Statue of Liberty
Ellis Island
Battery Park
Lower Manhattan
Ground Zero
Greenwich Village
SoHo

June 27:
Gettysburg battlefield tour
travel to DC
Smithsonian Institution: Air and Space, Natural History, American History (way, way, way too little time, but you could easily spend a week at the Smithsonian, I'm sure)
National Archives (saw the original Declaration of Independence and Constitution)
White House (quick photo stop - no tour, but on the list for next year)
Washington Monument (same deal - didja know you can ride an elevator to the top?)
Jefferson Memorial
FDR Memorial

June 28:
Library of Congress
Tour of the Capitol
Holocaust Museum
Vietnam Memorial
Korean War Memorial
World War II Memorial

June 29:
Arlington National Cemetery (two of my girls got to lay a wreath at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier)
Kennedy Gravesites
Changing of the Guard
Challenger and Columbia memorials
Iwo Jima memorial (met an old guy there who was giving a talk - he was a Marine at Iwo Jima)
Lunch at the Michie Tavern in Charlottesville, VA (a 1720s-era tavern, originally located in northern Virginia, but moved board by board down to Charlottesville to take advantage of tourist traffic to Monticello in the 1920s)
Tour of Monticello, home of Thomas Jefferson (darned near everything on display in the house was genuinely owned by ol' TJ himself - the tour guides we had were nearly always at the end of their ropes with nearly 40 fourteen-year-olds meandering through Tom Jefferson's house, but, hey, the stuff is irreplaceable, after all)
Check in at our hotel in Williamsburg, spend three hours playing volleyball in the pool with a bunch of the kids

June 30:
Self-guided tour of Williamsburg, VA (if you don't know, they have something on the order of a hundred actors working the place, all in colonial costume, all in character. Colonial Williamsburg is mostly new structures built on drawings and paintings of the originals, but it's still cool). I got the gentleman who was giving us a tour of the colonial capitol building into a bit of a tizzy (that I could tell he really loved) by asking him the following (remember, he's in character as a gentleman in colonial Williamsburg in 1775, shortly before the events of Lexington and Concord, and not long after the Boston Tea Party):

"Sir, " I asked him, "back home in England, we have been greatly distressed to hear of the criminal actions of the rebels who destroyed so much of the East India Company's tea in the guise of a 'protest.' What does the common man in the Virginia Colony think of these actions?"

I could see the smile in the guy's eyes as he began his windup (I'm sure most of his "tour groups" end up being a bunch of dead fish): "Sir, I must suppose you are recently arrived from England?" he inquired, rather cuttingly.

"Yes, I am, actually."

"Well," to the crowd, "the gentleman here raises a somewhat inflammatory question, referring to our brother colonists in Massachusetts as 'rebels'! You all must understand, although the actions of those few men at Boston Harbor were certainly illegal, our fellow Englishmen in Massachusetts have suffered greatly under the crown. Do you realize, sir, that there are ARMED SOLDIERS in Boston as we speak? Although as a gentleman I must say I abhor the actions of these men, I still must say that I cannot hold them completely at fault, and must lay some of the blame with Parliament itself."


Hot damn. How cool. Got it all on video, too.

After Williamsburg, we drove over to the Busch Gardens amusement park, and, despite having the rollercoasters shut down for a couple hours due to a thunderstorm that blew through, we had an awesome time.

July 1:
We packed up, and drove on out to Virginia Beach, and let the kids swim and shop for about three hours before heading over to the airport. We got home about 9:15 that night.


Writing it up like this, it seems like much less than was. We all felt like we'd traveled for about a month in that one week.

My photos are at Costco right now, but as soon as I get 'em, I'll post pictures from the trip.