To make the trip worthwhile, I decided to stay the weekend, which would afford the opportunity to see my sister's new house and also catch up with a few friends. On the way in I stopped for lunch with a former co-worker from Florida, Rob Treat, who is now saving the open source database world from his new base in Columbia, MD and doing well.
After the talk, I headed out to my sister's new townhouse. (I apologize for the rotation of this picture - Blogger apparently has a bug in it - it's rotated correctly when I import it.)
The new house is great. Lots of room and a great kitchen.
It has a lot of interesting angles for a townhouse, not the typical rectangle that you would expect.
On Saturday, I decided to take my mom into DC for the day since she rarely makes it there. Also (and this is shocking), my family has lived in DC since 1988, and my mother had never ridden the Metro!! So off we went into town on the Metro... (Blogger bug again)
Neither of us had ever been to the National Botanic Gardens, so that was our first stop. They just opened a new outdoor garden alongside the conservatory, and it looks like they did a really nice job.
Inside the Conservatory itself, we stopped for a picture in the jungle.
After wandering through the Conservatory for a while, we headed over to one of the newest museums in town, the Museum of the American Indian. I was surprised to learn that it covers all native Americans from Alaska down to Chile. It was also nice to see how well they integrated input from many tribes into a cohesive museum experience. For lunch, we had heard that the museum's food court was among the best in town, and it did not disappoint, with five stations representing food from different native American regions. I managed to work in three of those into one (very large) lunch.
We finished the day at the National Gallery of Art. Mom had never seen actual paintings on the caliber of Monets, Van Goghs or Cezannes, so it was a real treat to see all of those and more in the Gallery. After a pass through the gift shop, it was home again on the Metro.
Sunday was a relaxation day. I tried to recreate my Dutch Baby breakfast for everyone, but mostly failed to get it to rise correctly. However, the results were still tasty, if a little more flattened than usual!
Somehow my sister, Cesar and Enzo all managed to avoid my camera for the entire weekend so I have no photos of them to post. I'll do better next time.
Sunday evening I met up with our friends Brendan and Lizzie and their boys Colby and Dylan for BBQ and a movie. They live close to the airport and more importantly, in the right spot to avoid morning rush hour on the way to my flight, so I crashed with them for the night. The boys gave my still-wonky knee a good workout running around in the yard, while Brendan and Lizzie made monstrous burgers and other BBQ food. We then watched The Last King of Scotland (disturbing but good) as a weekend wrap-up.
Great short getaway trip! After the trip I was only home for four days before heading out again to Dallas for Memorial Day weekend (blog coming shortly).
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