Family Trip #8 : Visiting Washington, DC

 In October of 1994, our family took a trip to Washington, DC. Scott was attending a conference there and we decided to all ago since I had an aunt there whom we could stay with. It was fortunate we went because a year later we moved there and it helped to know exactly where we were going. We drove there in our Toyota van.

The weather was beautiful. We went to the Mall and the Smithsonian Natural History museum. David was a big dinosaur fan and I had made this dinosaur sweatshirt for him. The boys didn't find the Smithsonian incredibly interesting since they were a little young for it.

We took the Metro home:

Here are the boys chasing some geese on a big field at NIST where Scott was attending the conference and where he later worked:

In Wisconsin, our next-door neighbors for a little while were Tom and Carolyn O'Brien. Coincidentally, Tom had the same adviser as Scott and they worked together for about a year before Tom took a job at NIST and they moved away. We visited them while we were there and had dinner with them. Chasing their cat was the very popular activity of the evening. Their two boys were David and Brian.

Here is my aunt Ruth with her children: Eva, Rosie, Marie, Daniel, and Scot. I think her husband Ed must have been at work or out of town.

Ruth took us down to the C&O Canal trail where they did a demo of how the barges operated on the canal with the locks:

Part of the downtown tour included seeing a statue of John Paul Jones:  I have not yet begun to fight!

On the way home, we stopped at Gettysburg and then continued on to visit our friends the Ropers who had moved to Lansdale. I remember the trip taking forever because we were trying to avoid the toll roads. Google Maps would have been really useful but did not yet exist.

We went to the park with their kids, Kelsie and Taylor. David and Taylor were good friends in Wisconsin and it was hard for them to say goodbye.