Category: life events

For our last full day near D.C., we decided to visit Mount Vernon. Brooke and I have both been to Monticello before and remember it fondly, but Mount Vernon was a little closer and would still hit the “This Old House” vibe we were shooting for.

Buuuuuuuuuut, remember when I said we were just going to keep the car sitting at our Airbnb and rely on the Metro for most transportation?? Well, we did…and that was fine…until we tried starting the car after a few days. Because when we tried starting the car it, uh, wouldn’t.

Luckily, we brought along a battery-powered jump starter. After a few minutes of figuring out how to correctly attach it to the battery (pretty sure we didn’t end up following the directions the way it wanted us to and just attached both leads directly to the battery), we got the car started. However, we had opened up the back of the car, and now it wouldn’t latch. It would kind of stay down-ish, but as we drove the car, the back would bounce up a bit from time to time, so we looked for the nearest place to figure out what was up. Thankfully, there was an Autozone a few blocks away and on our way out of town, so we circled back and stop there. A very nice gentleman was very helpful for us and got us a new battery. The Outback hadn’t had its battery replaced in 80,000 miles, so it was time (though frustrating that the Subaru dealership didn’t clock that we should probably get a new battery…). After a few more troubleshooting issues, we got the rear hatch to latch, as well (probably some magnet that needed to be reset so it would work again).

After that debacle, we headed to Mount Vernon. We missed a “grounds tour” on account of car trouble, but we made it in time for the more important “house tour.” We walked the grounds for a bit before the tour was ready, seeing some of the garden plots in the areas that George Washington and his employees (read: slaves) worked. The organization that runs the site generally tries to grow the same kinds of crops that were grown in Washington’s era, and where possible, they also use those same crops in the on-site restaurant.

One of the things I didn’t remember from the last time I was there (….30 years ago…) was a building designed by Washington that featured horses walking in a circle, threshing wheat in service of letting the grain fall beneath the building so it could be collected for flour. Apparently, this was something of an innovation in the era that Washington figured out. It was more efficient than doing the same job outside, where straw and grain would get mixed up more, and the wind would blow some of it away. They didn’t have any horses actually doing this, but it was still interesting!

After that, we visited the estate itself, walking through restored bits of the house and learning about its restoration. There were archeologists on site excavating the area near the house. They were also actively working on the foundation of the house, so it was interesting to see the level of construction being applied to keep everything functional

The outside of the house was different than it was 30 years ago, too. When I was there last, the house was painted white, but this time, it was a more tan color, since the paint was mixed with sand, giving it a more textured look that resembled stone. It actually looked pretty good, and is supposedly more accurate to what was done in Washington’s time.

The inside of the house was…still old house?? On the one hand, it’s cool to see furniture and spaces that are historically appropriate and hear about some of the luminaries who stayed at the house (e.g. “this room was for guest to stay in, but this room is for folks George actually respected to stay in”). The room pictured above was George and Martha’s master bedroom, upstairs.

On a side note, our house was built in 1904, so our house is old, but not this old. Still, at lot of the same design cues: high ceilings, relatively thick crown moulding, slat floors. The similarities were rather familiar to us!

After Mount Vernon, we headed back to the Airbnb for one last evening! I went to dinner with a friend of mine who lived in the area while Brooke and the kids stayed behind and had pasta. They started packing some things up and by the time I returned, I helped load some things in the car that needed to go the next day.

We hopped in the car and started heading back home to Marshall, stopping in a small town north of Evansville, IN. We made really good time and the kids did well on the return trip. From there, it was only another 5.5 hours to Marshall, so we could take things easy that Saturday, leaving us with Sunday for Brooke to recover before work on Monday.

Buuuuuuuuuuut, that would be too easy, wouldn’t it?! We made this whole drive, over 2600 miles, and the construction on I-70 finally caught up to us. Maybe a mile from the Kingdom City exit on I-70, about 1.5 hrs from home, a tractor trailer had an accident and turned over on its side, blocking all of westbound I-70. So we were stuck there for an hour until highway patrol was able to shuffle all the other massive trucks off onto the shoulder so the cars could get off the highway onto the service road. Due to the construction on I-70, completing six lanes by 2030 (fingers crossed….), there was already a gravel pad between westbound I-70 and the service road, so they directed the capable vehicles (i.e. not semi trucks) that way so we could get to the exit and hop back on I-70.

So yeah, it figures that given 2600+ miles of travel, we only had a serious delay in the home stretch of the trip. Alas….makes for a good story…

And that’s it! Another family vacation in the books that will hopefully be memorable for the kids, but also get the “road trip” bug out of our system for another year. We’ve got some ideas for 2027 (and maybe even Winter 2026, but we’ll see on that one), but for now, it’s time to focus on the beginning of the school year!

The next day, we headed toward our (mostly) final destination of the trip: Washington, D.C. Before heading out of Rehoboth Beach, DE, we took one more stroll down the boardwalk and had breakfast looking out over the ocean, but after that, it was a few hours to the city. We weren’t sure what we would do between Delaware and D.C. (stopped at a nice roadside produce stand, at least!), but we ultimately settled on moving one of our visits planned for later in the week to the first day.

I had been to D.C. before, and been to the Smithsonian Air & Space Museum multiple times, but since I was last there, the remaining space shuttles were placed around the country, and Space Shuttle Discovery was given to the Smithsonian Institution. However, the thing is so big that it couldn’t go where the regular Air & Space Museum is, so it lives at the Udvar-Hazy Center near Dulles Airport. We figured that we would do most of our Capitol Mall stuff for a few days, then drive to Dulles to see the Space Shuttle, but we decided we had the time to just do it on the way into town so we could just rely on the Metro light rail system for the rest of the trip (this will be important later……..).

The Udvar-Hazy Center is really just a huge hangar and a control tower that you can visit. It has the Space Shuttle (which was really cool!), an SR-71 Blackbird (also really cool!), among other exhibits ranging from World War II planes, the Enola Gay, and early passenger jets. We only spent maybe an hour and a half walking around and seeing everything, but I don’t think we needed more time. I don’t know about the kids, but at least I’m glad we took the time to go!

After that, we went to our Airbnb in eastern D.C. I mentioned to a few folks from the area where we were staying and both of them questioned the location and its safety. Thankfully, any such fears were unfounded: it ended up being the perfect place for us. There were three bedrooms, a nice kitchen setup, it had off-street gated parking behind the house, and it was less than a block from the Minnesota Ave. Metro Station, so travel to the Mall (and elsewhere) was really easy. The owner of the house lived in an apartment downstairs, leaving us with the main floor and the upstairs. We only saw her a few times, mostly out walking her dog. It was a pleasant stay and we wouldn’t ask for much more!

The next day, we had a tour scheduled for the U.S. Capitol Building. We were initially a bit panicked because we didn’t anticipate the line to get in. Sure, we knew there would be a security check, but the line was so long, we weren’t entirely sure we would get through it in time to take the tour we had scheduled. This was a “step up” Capitol tour run by their guides, so it wasn’t booked through one of our Representatives or anything. Ed was our tour guide, and I thought he was pretty spectacular. You could tell that he’d been delivering this tour for many years, but also that he had to make things humorous for himself, having done it over and over again. His dry sense of humor was pretty great.

After the Capitol Building, we had a tour scheduled for the Washington Monument, but that wasn’t going to be for a few hours, so we stopped by a few other sights on the Mall. We hit the National Archives to see the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights (and we quickly discovered that our kids really didn’t understand what each of those documents did, or why we needed a “Bill of Rights”….so we had to have some conversations…). Then, we stopped at the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History for a bit, long enough to see the dinosaur exhibit and some gemstones upstairs like the Hope Diamond.

This part of the trip also brought us our first….”friction??”…moment of the trip. It was lunch time and we had planned on visiting food trucks out near the Smithsonian, but we didn’t see them and didn’t really know where they were. The kids were complaining and neither one really wanted to compromise on their expectation for what we would get, so we ended up ducking into this place adjacent to a garden that had sandwich stuff, drinks, etc. It was pretty expensive for what you got, and Brooke was especially annoyed by this whole process (understandably).

After killing a few hours, we headed toward the Washington Monument, something that none of us had actually gone up in before. I feel like the last few times I’ve gone to D.C., it’s always been under some kind of repair, so it was pretty special to finally go up inside it. The view was as one would expect, with the ability to look out the windows from all four sides and see various sights around the Mall. In some ways, it was like going up in the St. Louis Arch: rode an elevator, looked out as many sides as we could, then rode it back down again. Not much to tell, but still a cool experience!

After that, we tried to hit as many monuments as we could. We hit the World War II, Korean War, and Vietnam War Memorials and had some good conversations with the kids about what each of those was about. We also saw the Lincoln, MLK, and FDR Memorials: we skilled the Jefferson Memorial this time since it was on the other side of the river and, honestly, we were just tired by then…

It was also really hot that afternoon and a storm was threatening, so we rushed through the memorials mostly as a “we were there!” kind of thing. The kids were especially “over it” by the time we hit this part in the day. They were entertained by a few bits here and there, but reading some quotes on marble slabs just wasn’t doing it for them. After a long day seeing just about everything we could, it was time to head back to the Airbnb.

The Metro experience was great, as always. Calvin, especially, got pretty good at following the map, knowing which direction we needed to be heading, and just generally paying attention to how we were getting around. The Metro itself was smooth, fast, predictable, and served our purposes well: no hiccups to speak of, and the air conditioning after a long day outside was most welcome, indeed.

That night, we made dinner and hung out at the house. We started watching a reality show called “100 Cooks,” hosted by Terry Crews. We started watching it in Philly, so each time we stayed somewhere, I had to hook up HBO Max so we could continue watching the show. Aside from playing a card game from time to time, it was nice to have a shared thing for all of us to enjoy!

The next day was Smithsonian Day! Again, we took the Metro in, but this time, we had a better lunch plan in mind and set expectations accordingly so things would go a bit more smoothly. We hit the Air and Space Museum first, which is always a highlight for me. I think the kids probably enjoyed this one the most, but it was probably also because we were only there for maybe an hour and a half and it was first thing in the morning, so they weren’t exhausted for this one. We saw the typical things, like Apollo 11, the Spirit of St. Louis, and my personal favorite, the filming model of the original Enterprise from “Star Trek: TOS.”

It lit up every hour on the hour! So cool!

After Air and Space, we went to an Ethiopian restaurant a few Metro stops north of the Mall (again, Calvin got to use his Metro navigation skills, taking us on a different line than we usually took). Ethiopian is apparently kind of a big deal among the immigrant population of D.C., and since we’d never really eaten anything like it before, we took the opportunity. It was different, but pretty good! The bread was especially foreign to us: it was almost more gelatinous than “fluffy,” like flour-based bread is? It’s spongy and very floppy. The internet says “pancake-like,” and while I could see that comparison, especially when talking about the density of it, it just doesn’t have much structure. Anyway, it was cool to try something very much not in our wheelhouse.

After lunch, we went to the National Portrait Gallery to see a lot of ….portraits… There isn’t much to say, honestly, except that the building was pretty cool and it was nice to go to a museum that isn’t as commonly frequented as the rest of the Smithsonian Institutes.

Then, we hit the Museum of American History, which is another fun one. Again, I think the kids liked Air and Space, but American History also had some fun stuff they recognized. They are of the generation, though, where they haven’t watched enough classic movies to understand why seeing Dorothy’s Ruby Slippers is such a big deal, for example, or who Julia Child is and why having her kitchen in the museum is interesting. They still found some stuff to look at and had a good time!

That evening, we met up with my cousin for dinner at a fancy place off the Mall. It was a “farm to table” kind of restaurant, so everything was really good. We had a nice visit and still made it home in time to watch some more “100 Cooks!”

That took us up through Wednesday of the trip, leaving only one full day left in the D.C. metro area. We’d seen a lot in two days, but had at least one more important thing to do!

As I mentioned before, the trip came together around a few things, so once we decided we were going to spend some time in Philadelphia, we also thought we could tack on a few college visits. Since colleges generally don’t run tours on the weekend, we had to schedule the tours for a weekday, and Friday was the most logical option. After that, it was a matter of choosing some colleges that were a). relatively close to one another; and b). had tour schedules that weren’t overlapping.

Brooke and I have been brainstorming some small, liberal arts schools for Meg to at least consider (we’re biased, I know…), and there are a few in that area. I had a friend from high school who went to Haverford College, so once I started looking into it, I found that Haverford, Swarthmore, and Bryn Mawr College are part of what they call the Tri-College Consortium, which allows students from each of those schools to participate in activities and take classes at the other schools. We ended up scheduling tours at Bryn Mawr College and University of Pennsylvania, giving Meg a “small, liberal arts school” to see, and an “elite Ivy University in the city” to compare to one another.

Unfortunately, wildfires in Canada were also happening and the air quality was rather hazardous. That meant that no one really wanted to be outside, so they didn’t opt to run the tours at Bryn Mawr or Penn that day. We still sat for a virtual tour with some other students at Bryn Mawr and got a feeling for the place, but then we rushed to Penn so we could get to that tour in time…even though that one was also canceled. Instead, they didn’t bother with the virtual tour but had their tour guides form a Q&A panel where they could address things.

I don’t know that Meg made any firm decisions based on so little information, but we’re still pretty early in the college search. I think she got a few of her questions answered and at least got a “feel” for those two places, so if she decides she wants to re-visit one, we can always make that happen (probably a plane flight next time, though…)

The next day was a Saturday, but we were going to see all the Philadelphia things and be tourists! Brooke scheduled two tours: one of Independence Hall for the afternoon, but another one for the morning at Reading Terminal Market. That tour started mid-morning, so we stopped at the Philadelphia Mint first (no pictures allowed). There wasn’t much to see, honestly, as it was a Saturday, so none of the equipment was working. It was cool to see some coins and how they’re generally made. They had some brand new quarters there that were minted for the 250th anniversary of the US, so we got some of those!

The Reading Terminal Market thing was really cool, though! It reminded me of the Soulard Farmer’s Market in St. Louis, but this one is mostly food vendors. We went because Brooke got some coupon as a part of using Airbnb so much that included a guided tour of the vendors. We probably would have been overwhelmed just walking through it, but our tour guide walked us around, provided some history for the space, and gave us her opinions on most of the food options. Calvin and I shared a Philly Cheesesteak from Uncle Gus’, and on the guide’s recommendation, Brooke got a roast pork sandwich from Tommy DiNic’s – both were excellent! Meg got a baked potato, because she’s boring….(she said it was good, though).

So yeah, Reading Terminal Market was a nice surprise! Very busy on a Saturday, but definitely worth checking out if you’re in the area! From there, we stopped in Elfreth’s Alley on the way back toward Independence Hall for our tour. Elfreth’s Alley is a cobblestone road between houses built as early as the 1720s, and people still live in them! We took a quick tour of one of them (like, $9 for all four of us) and, yep, it was an old house. High ceilings, wood floors, fireplaces in rooms for heating, no modern kitchen or running water. Most of the houses along Elfreth’s Alley are modernized because, again, people still live in them, but the one we walked through was mostly kept as it was in the 1700s/1800s.

The tour for Independence Hall was run by the National Park Service, and Brooke and I are always fans of those: inexpensive and informative. A lot of the furniture in Independence Hall is era appropriate, meaning it wasn’t actually there during the signing of the Declaration or the Constitution, but that chair in the background behind Meg and Calvin was the one George Washington sat in, so that was cool!

At multiple points during the trip, though especially once we started talking about Independence Hall, it started becoming painfully obvious that the kids really hadn’t learned all that much about the American Revolution in school. Not to say they didn’t know anything, but the timeline, which documents were signed where, why the Bill of Rights exists… I was hoping they would have a bit more grounding in those areas, but alas, they still had questions (usually good ones! …just surprising, at times…).

After Independence Hall, we went and saw the Liberty Bell, as it’s displayed in a separate building just outside. I’m glad we saw it, but Brooke and the kids questioned the point of its existence. I learned that the crack in the bell was actually the result of a repair to the bell – there’s a separate crack coming off of the iconic one, though, that caused the bell to not be used anymore.

The Liberty Bell didn’t take all that long, but there was rain coming in, so we went back to our Airbnb for the night. The one in Philly was in a somewhat sketchy neighborhood, but we didn’t have any issues. We were staying relatively close to where the World Cup Fan Fest was occurring, so there was a lot of traffic and loud cars going just about all night. Still, it was nice to have a kitchen, separate beds, and more space to spread out. Unfortunately, this was really the only spot where we had laundry service available, aside from the errant hotel laundry options, so we caught up on some of that, too.

The next day, we headed toward…Delaware! When we reorganized the dates a bit to fit in college visits, it shifted things between the Airbnb in Philly and the one in D.C., so we had another day in between. I don’t remember how it came up, though I imagine Brooke was probably talking to the kids and threw out: “Hey, maybe we should go to Delaware,” and they cheered with “YEAHs!”

So, the decision was made to go to Rehoboth Beach, DE. It actually gave us the opportunity to drive through New Jersey on the way, adding another state to the visit. We really just drove through, but ended up traveling through some seaside towns on our way south, along the coast. There were some nice beachside towns along the way, but it seemed pretty clear that these were second/third homes for New Yorkers, etc. where their kids were down for the summer while the parents still worked in the city. A lot of expensive cars and nice condos and houses all over the place. We got out and walked to one of the beaches on our way down, but didn’t stay all that long.

Brooke found a ferry that features a 40 minute ride across a bay between Jersey and Delaware. It also had limited meal service, so we could have lunch while we enjoyed the ride. We hadn’t done one of these since our last Madeline Island trip, so it was a neat return to something from one of our earliest vacations with the kids.

After the ferry ride, the drive to Rehoboth Beach wasn’t all that long. We were there by mid-afternoon, arriving before we could check in to our hotel. We asked if we could park the car there even though we weren’t technically checked in yet (they graciously said “yes”) and we walked about a mile down toward the beach. Rehoboth has a boardwalk, shops, restaurants, and some arcades (we played a lot of Skee-Ball).

After we got something to eat at Dogfish Head Brewery (not their main brewing location in Delaware, but a nice secondary restaurant space about half a mile from our hotel), Brooke, Calvin, and I went to a beachfront state park a few miles away so Calvin could swim a bit. Meg had just started an online class, so she needed some time to get some homework done when she wasn’t riding in a car. The water was chilly, but pretty clear. No seaweed or jellyfish or anything like that along the beaches we saw. There were some seashells, but mostly fragments. It also wasn’t terribly crowded, though Rehoboth Beach itself definitely featured a lot more people. Still, the thing I detest about Florida beaches I’ve been to in recent years (e.g. Destin) is how the beaches feel fragmented by the condos and hotels that are there, with their own chairs and umbrellas you have to pay extra for. I’m sure that exists in Jersey and Delaware, but we didn’t see that here. It was a traditional “first come, first serve” beach space, which I appreciate.

The next morning, we got up relatively early (we were really running on Central Time this whole trip, so everyone woke up in the 6:00-7:00 Eastern Time frame most days), went back to the boardwalk to check out the morning vibes (a lot of cyclists and joggers) and have breakfast before driving to D.C. Rehoboth was a good time, though it’s a hike to get there, so I can’t imagine we’ll go back any time soon.

This trip was a long time coming! Early on, we knew we wanted to take the kids to Washington, D.C., but we knew we’d have to wait awhile, until they were old enough to have some sense of the history of the area, an understanding of what’s in the Smithsonian Museum (and the ability to read…), and a willingness to walk (a lot!). Meg had Missouri Scholars Academy for three weeks in June, so we signed up Calvin for his “sleep away” camp at YMCA Camp Wakonda around that same time, leaving July open for a driving vacation out east!

As this trip evolved, we tacked on a few other things. Calvin had been asking to go to Hershey, PA ever since he found out that Hershey was a real place (with a theme park). We also added Philadelphia, PA to the trip, since none of us had ever been there. While we were in Philly, we also stopped by a few colleges that Meg may consider (more on that later). So yeah, we saw a lot of stuff in 11 days!

On the way out, Brooke had heard from a co-worker about Casey, IL, a small town whose claim to fame was a collection of some of the “World’s Largest ______________” things. For example, here’s a giant chair (with Calvin next to it, off to the left, for scale). We also saw windchimes, a mailbox (below), a golf tee (at the country club, naturally), bird cage, see saw, and pencil. It was a relatively short detour off our course, but we like to add in those bits of Americana into our road trips where possible.

We stayed in a hotel that night (one of many…) in Ohio and got up the next morning to head into Pennsylvania. We weren’t originally thinking about it, but as we drew closer to looking at the route, we realized we could stop at the Flight 93 National Memorial while we were making the trip in. The kids knew about 9/11, but mostly the Twin Towers portion of the story: not the Pentagon or Flight 93. It allowed us to talk about it a bit, and it was also an opportunity to cover what Brooke and I were doing as everything unfolded 25 years ago.

Honestly, it was a pretty somber visit. There isn’t much to see, and their museum is mostly covering the entire 9/11 story, not just the Flight 93 portion of it. There were some artifacts, but a lot of it was news broadcasts, pictures of the passengers, and a timeline of the events on that day. We’re glad we stopped in, as we probably wouldn’t have had the opportunity to go otherwise.

It did end up adding a few hours to our travel time than we were initially planning for, though. The Memorial isn’t exactly “right off the highway,” so navigating to Hershey from there took longer than we planned, but it ended up working alright. We had tickets for the next day, but like other theme parks, after 7:00 pm the day before you have tickets, you can go ahead into the park and check things out for a few hours.

There are actually two “Hershey” things to do at the park: one is Hershey Chocolate World, which is free (mostly) and is basically a big candy store. The ride above was the only thing we did in Chocolate World, aside from looking around at candy, t-shirts, and having a light dinner. After that, we had to drive the car from the free parking lot around to the paid one to actually enter Hersheypark Amusement Park. As it was relatively late, and we’d been driving all day, we got our bearings and rode Comet (an old-ish roller coaster), the Tea Cups, and Brooke and Calvin went up Hershey Triple Tower (there are three towers, gradually increasing in height – you are shot up the tower, you get dropped, you go back up…you get it…).

Hersheypark feels very compact, like they had limited space to fit in all the roller coasters, so they’re kinda weaving in and out of one another. There is a water park associated with it, too, but that’s more at the back of the park (think of it more like a rectangle than a square, so you park in the lot, and you have to walk through a lot of park to get to the water section).

It was very hot, so that ended up affecting some rides. We waited in line for Coal Cracker (log flume) and got pretty far, only to have it shut down while we were in line, so that was disappointing. Great Bear (kinda like Batman: The Ride at Six Flags St. Louis) was pretty good, but we were delayed as we were ready to load onto the coaster by someone who threw up on the seats, so we had to wait for their cleaning protocol to be carried out.

I think the ride we all liked the most was Candymonium (pretty smooth, relatively new, coaster), but that was the first thing we rode that Thursday morning, so in some ways it was down hill from there. Brooke, Meg, and Calvin did Skyrush (I looked at how high it was going to go and said “nuh uh”), and Meg wished she had taken my lead. She said it jostled them around and forced their heads down. We also rode Trailblazer and soopersdooperLooper, and both were “fine” (the latter only had one loop, so it was mostly intended for younger kids, we think).

Jolly Rancher Remix was the last thing we rode, and it ended up being a solid bookend to Candymonium that morning. Jolly Rancher is also pretty new, so it is smooth, but what it does is backs you up on the coaster, then drops you down the hill, through 4 or 5 loops, then you go up the other side….only to be dropped down backwards through what you just went through. I normally don’t like those, but this one was pretty fun!

One nice thing is that they let you leave the park and re-enter. They have workers taking pictures with a cell phone (essentially…), so when you return, they compare using facial recognition to allow you back in. We had some lunch stuff in the car, so we went out and found a shady spot. It was also nice to just sit for awhile before going back in.

Ultimately, Calvin had a good time at Hersheypark. Was it as good as Disneyland? Uhhhh, no. But probably nothing is. The experience was marred by some delays and broken down equipment, so that wasn’t great. We paid $27 for a refillable soda cup that we could all share, but more than a few self-serve stations weren’t working, making us question whether the cup was worth it in the end. We didn’t pay for the “Fast Pass” they were offering, but it seemed like most other folks weren’t, either.

Would we go back?? Yeah, I think so! One day was enough, though. Disneyland benefited by having 3 days in the parks to walk around. There are a few rides we would have gone on again, but the heat and lines had us focus on the rides we hadn’t gone on yet. After awhile, I think we were all pretty over it, so we stopped in to Hershey Chocolate World, filled up on some candy bars, and headed out toward Philly!

….but that’s a story for another post. 🙂