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We enjoyed a wonderful, refreshing honeymoon in April and we would like to share photos and stories from our trip with all of you. We would also like to extend a sincere thanks to all of you because with your gifts you made this honeymoon a reality. We hope you enjoy reading about it.

Day 1 - A Day of Traveling

Nothing exciting on day one. We flew, and then flew some more. Since we were in the air during dinner time, when we arrived at our hotel in DC at 11 pm we were very grateful to be staying at a hotel with a real concierge who could direct us to a restaurant that was still open and serving food (The Front Page). Despite the nightclub in the other rooms of the restaurant, it was still Wonderful Meal #1.

We stayed at the Hotel Madera near DuPont Circle. It is a boutique hotel that is a member of the Green Hotel Association. I think it may have been the fanciest hotel either one of us has ever stayed in.


Mike recorded a tour on our camera but it is currently 200MB and therefore too large for web viewing. Sorry.

Mike wasn't keen on the view because we were on the 10th floor and he's not happy about heights. You can see the drop here, as well as the Egyptian embassy building that was across the street and the Historical Society building that was north of the embassy.

Here are pictures of our hotel from the outside. It was a very small hotel.

Day 2 - "Getting Our Bearings"

As the first day in DC, we spent the day trying figure out our way around. So the first stop was to head a block and half north to DuPont Circle and try to find the Metro Station. On our way around the circle we stumbled on a nice little asian diner, Raku, for Wonderful Meal #2. The entrance to the Metro station at DuPont circle is a very long and steep escalator. Again, with Mike not being fond of heights he was not too fond of that entrance. I didn't have a problem with the height, but I was amazed at the people who could run down the escalator! It felt too steep to me for anything faster than a walking descent.

Neither Mike nor I have ever lived in a place with a particularly effective mass transit system, but luckily I have been on BART and CalTrain a couple of times. I hate tourists, and I hate looking like one, so I was thankful that I did have an idea of how to get tickets and maneuver the Metro.


We decided to first hit Ford's Theater, which is a slight walk from the nearest Metro Station. So we started walking in what I thought was the currect direction (one problem with a subway is that you have to re-orient your directions every time you come back up to the surface; when you are unfamiliar with an area that can be slightly disconcerting). Just as I started to second-guess my map reading skills we turned a corner and there it was! Closed! I guess it's under renovation this year. We were able to do the 5 minute tour of the house where Lincoln died. On the corner there was a souvenir store that we referred to throughout the trip as the "America threw up store" because that seemed an apt description of the high concentration of DC/US souvenirs stuffed into a rather large store with more window than wall. Most of the souvenir stores are much less in-your-face.

Here's a picture of Mike in front of the shuttered Ford's Theater. -->

After not seeing Ford's Theater, we wandered over to the Spy Museum. I had heard pretty good reviews from co-workers, but we found it overwhelming. I was downright dizzy by the time we left, so we skipped the more recent "history" that has occurred within our lifetimes. It is chock full of really interesting spy stuff and we certainly learned a lot. My complaint was in the changing lights, loud sounds that overlapped each other, and lack of right angles. Appropriate, sure, but comfortable, no. Mike also wished they had more benches, and he got kind of tired of the multitude of ring guns, lipstick guns, cigarette pack guns, you get the picture. One of the interesting things that we learned was that George Washington was a spymaster. Overall it was fun and educational, if a bit gimicky.

<-- Here's a picture of me in front of the Spy Museum.

The Spy Museum is across the street from the Smithsonian American Art Museum (National Portrait Gallery) so we wandered around in there for a while looking at a variety of work, including the Presidents' portraits. -->

We were meeting my cousin MacLane in Alexandria for dinner, so we had to make an uneducated guess about how long it would take to get to Alexandria on the Metro. Our first mistake was in underestimating the time required, our (my) second mistake was in no being familiar enough with the Metro and street maps to realize that had we exited the Portrait Gallery from the other side we could have caught the Yellow line directly to Alexandria instead of going the more round about way, and our third mistake was in forgetting that we would be out of cell phone range while on the Metro. So we were 30 minutes late for dinner (sorry MacLane). We did have to pause long enough at the King Street station for Mike to take this picture of the George Washington National Masonic Memorial (long story).

Dinner was at Joe Theisman's restaurant, and it was Wonderful Meal #3 with excellent (and long) conversation. Unfortunately since I had the camera at the time, and I forget to take pictures, we didn't get a picture with MacLane.

Our last day was uneventfuly. We got up in the morning and drove back to Reagan Airport, arriving with enough time to grab some lunch. We had seen an ad for Legal Seafood on the way to the airport, so before we settled for some general airport food, we looked into that. Sure enough! There is a Legal Seafood in Ronald Reagan Airport. (Trisha, you got Mike hooked.) So before getting on our plane we were able to end our honeymoon with Wonderful (if a bit rushed) Meal #13. Oh, by the way, the picture is Maya in the airport, which is actually an attractive airport (except for the baggage claim).

Most photos taken by Mike, some by Maya


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