Washington DC

On the First weekend of December Nikki and went to Washington DC to celebrate our 2nd Anniversary. We had a great time.

[DAY 1]We took Friday off and drove down. We got there around 4 or 5pm i think. We stayed in Rosellyn, Virgina (just across the Potomic) in a Holiday Inn. The room was great and cheap...just what i like HA! (ed. note: Nikki rolled her eyes big time at this point) We even had a balcony over looking the river, free parking and basically subsidized breakfast ( i think we paid around a dollar a day for the both of us. NICE!)
The night that we got there we checked in and then hopped on the Metro which was 3 blocks away. The Metro is so great! Clean and easy. Our first stop was to Zed's Ethiopian restaurant. Superb service and all sorts of political celebs have eaten there. Great place.
We then toured the Mall and monuments seeing the capitol, Washington monument, White house, WW2 memorial and Lincoln memorial.

[DAY 2] We got up and headed to Mount Vernon. We meant to only spend half a day here but because of the new museum and visitor center we spent just about the whole day. Mount Vernon the house was interesting although i felt like we were "processed" through there a bit too quickly. I liked the museum more than Nikki. But we both agreed it was a bit over the top. By the end you kind of feel like the theme of the place should be: "Washington the God" BUT, it's still worth going of course! We then headed back to the hotel and ate in our hotel restaurant (20% off dinner...WooHoo!) But the food was just ok...Nikki didn't like her dish. (ed. note: Nikki's dish was a chicken curry made with all wings, which is just weird, no veggies or anything! Bleh!)

[DAY 3]After spending so much time in Mount Vernon Nikki wanted to spend time in the Mall area so that's where we went. First off to the Spy Museum. We both thought it was interesting and started off well but it got boring and didn't stay on track. I wouldn't recommend it. Then we went to the Air and Space Museum where Nikki yawned while i checked out the planes. The highlight there for Nikki was a that we swear we saw Hamid Karzai (ed note: Hamid Karzai is the President of Afghanistan and an all around spiffy dresser)! I don't think it was him...but he looked Arab and had tons of security...they kept shooing us away. Nikki kept asking the Secret Service who it was lol. But they kept acting like it was a secret or something. They refused to answer but were nice about it. After that we split.

On the way home Nikki had the wonderful idea to lengthen and enrich our trip by having dinner in Baltimore so we drove all over the city trying to find a place that agreed with her...but she couldn't find pme so we ended up stopping in a Popeye's Joint in what Nikki deemed an unsavory neighborhood. It looked ok to me though.

We basically walked in the door and passed out on the bed. Whew!

Here are a bunch of pics from the weekend!

Some sort of memorial on the Mall.

WW2 Memorial. VERY nice at night.

More WW2 Memorial.

View from our balcony.

At White House fence.

Mount Vernon.

Washington knew how to pick'em! What a view. And check out those two trees...they're on fire i think!

AWWWW Happy Anniversary to us hehe!

Look its me!

My Crazy Sleepy Self

Some of you have probably heard of some of the wierd and funny things I have done sleeping.
Well I did it again! Here is the play-by-play according to Nikki.
Oh and don't ask me WHY i was dreaming of icicles! HAHA

This takes place at 4 AM one morning. Nikki is sleeping soundly and Ron is sleeping too, although less soundly....

RON: Sweetie, sweetie ::nudge nudge:: I’m going to turn the light on okay?

NIKKI: Huh? Why do you have to turn the light on?

RON: There are icicles on the ceiling and I just want to knock them down…

NIKKI: …..Silence…..

RON: Okay, so I’m going to turn the lights on?

NIKKI: Ron there aren’t any icicles on the ceiling, you’re dreaming. How could there be iciles on the ceiling?

RON: No, they are there. They are made of minerals.

NIKKI: :Shaking you: Ron, WAKE UP YOU”RE SLEEPING.

RON: No…there are minerals and…oh I think I just said that to make it sound so real…… hehe….zzzzzzz zzzzzz zzzzz

NIKKI: oh boy ha ha!

Jack-O-Lanterns Part Deux

Taking no chances this time Nikki and I bought and carved a couple pumpkins the day before Halloween. TRICK or TREAT!
Notice the "theme" too...my pumkin has scared the other...hehe

Gettysburg - Part Une

We're not in Kansas any more.

It’s amazing to me, how a drive of 3.5 hours can take you to an entirely different world. But that, dear readers is the truth of what happened to my mom, my Ron, and myself as we went to Gettysburg, PA last weekend or the weekend before or something....

We left on a Friday afternoon for the drive and we took our handy-dandy GPS along because she knew the way. My mom drove (THE ENTIRE WEEKEND despite offers of reprieve). The ride up was fairly smooth with route 78 being the exception (as usual). It took us about 3.5 hours to get to our hotel in Gettysburg, PA.

First a few reflections on the town:

I was very surprised that for all its fame, Gettysburg is truly a sleepy little town. It's got a population of about 7,000 people, which is not a far cry from its 1863 pop of just over 2,000. That is not a lot of growth in 150 years! The economy of the place appears to be strictly based on tourism and the enterprising townsfolk (yes they're townsfolk) have fully capitalized on that bloody battle so many years ago. We've got Pickett's Buffet, American History Bookshop, and about 6 million Civil War Memorabilia Shops. (we saw about 1/3rd of them hehe)

So when we arrived we quickly checked into our hotel which was really nice. The beds were as comfy as what we have at home! We quickly made a mess of the room and then headed off to our first event. A HAUNTED TRAIL RIDE WOOOOOOOOOOO!

This was a silly, silly ride, but the sad part is that it had all the potential in the world of being a great night of fun. First it was on an old train (I think it was 80-something years old) then it had the fortune to be a very dark, cold and stormy night! What luck! Lastly it was riding right THROUGH the creepy, foggy, blood-soaked (not literally) battlefield of Gettysburg!!!

How could this not be wonderful?!

I'll tell you how...first it didn't have all of those people in scary costumes walking up and down the aisle. From the safety of my computer I can announce with confidence that those things are ridiculous....but when I'm on the train I'm positively petrified. No this haunted train didn’t' take that route, instead they had a ghost "Expert" on board to tell ghost stories about Gettysburg. Now, I'm someone who loves oral history and I love love LOVE a good storyteller, so this had all the makings of a fabulous evening. Buuuuuttttttt this woman, our ghost "expert" was awful. She had this weird sing-song voice and she spoke for the entire two hours. One after another they came, 100 year old accounts from someone's senile aunt who remembered seeing the head of coal miner floating outside her window and so on. Eventually she ran out of supernatural and just started telling horror stories about train crashes, re-enacting whenever possible the screams of the victims and relaying in bloody detail the extent of their injuries.

I was really not alone in my dislike for the "entertainment" the people in the car around us started heckling a bit. (Don’t worry she was not near enough to hear them). Frankly, we were grateful for some comic relief because the ride was getting lloooong. haha!

Moving on we went back and had dinner at Perkins restaurant which is not very interesting but was in our direct line of vision.

After that we went back to our room and fell asleep. Big day on Saturday… we're heading out to the battlefield.

An Exhibition of Nikki

We're back from our trip to Gettysburg, PA. We all had a great time. Pictures to follow but first.....

I am going through the process of moving all of the digital pictures that Ron and I take, off of the computer and onto CD. It's also my intention to move the pictures onto Kodak Gallary as well. It's happening.... but slowly. Anyway I found some pictures of my latest batch of pumpkin spice candles (they smell great).

Pumpkins Don't Like Us

Last night we came home to this! It was like a crime scene. The pumpkin "blood" leaked onto our chair too. We have since cleaned the seat and it's fine. Looks like Nikki won the battle over who can find the best method to preserve their pumpkin.
However, I think the death of this pumkin was suspicious...was it natural or homicide!