The Trip Home, March 30 - April 3

  We had a good trip home, although the weather got colder and colder!
   Our first stop was in Savannah where we stayed at a mid-town hotel. We got in early enough to enjoy the city. We tried to contact Nicci Aguiar who is a junior at SCAD, but we didn't give her enough advance notice. (We didn't know how long it would take us to get there). Mark checked out Trip Advisor and we went to Sweet Spice, a little Jamaican restaurant to eat as it had such a high rating. It was a little hole in the wall with just a few tables. But, wow, was it delicious. We both had jerk chicken with a bunch of sides. (I had plantains, having gotten very fond of them in Costa Rica.) And, they had a delicious lemonade with ginger. We had time to then stroll the waterfront which was a lot of fun. We bought the grandchildren in Concord some chocolates from the candy store there. We really enjoyed our visit to Savannah, brief as it was.
   Our next stop was Emporia, Virginia - just a stopover. But we had a very delicious late lunch in downtown Emporia at "The Bank" restaurant, converted from an old time bank. As we were between meals, we were the only customers. The food was fantastic. I had a seared ahi tuna salad which was as good as we had in Costa Rica. It had a cucumber sauce made with a touch of wasabi. Mark had .....
It is a good idea to go into the towns off the major highways and not just eat at the standard Denny's or Cracker Barrels.
    Next up - two days in Washington, D.C. We stayed in Alexandria at a dreadful Days Inn. All that can be said for the tired, dingy place was that it has a good location. We had to stop in Washington because the digital copy of the Cyrus Peirce petitions that we got at the National Archives on our way to Florida got destroyed. Mark left the flash drive in a pocket and I washed it. But, going back to Washington is never a hardship for us as we love the city. The cherry blossoms were in bud, but only a few were blooming.
   The first night we met Meaghan Lynch, a former student and now an employee of the Defense Intelligence Agency. It was a very special evening. We went to Willow Restaurant in Alexandria where Meaghan has worked since her undergraduate days at Georgetown. Meaghan picked us up at the hotel and also insisted on picking up the tab. Dinner was excellent. I had ahi tuna again - I sense a pattern here and a lingering vacation feeling from Costa Rica. Great conversation and just an overall wonderful time. It was just so nice to see such an accomplished and wonderful young woman.
   The next day we got up early and went to the Archives. Mark parked right across from the Natural Science Museum in the smallest possible parking space. He had onlookers, it was so amazing. We easily copied the petitions and then we wandered for a while in the Art Museum. Then we drove to G Street where we at at Absolute Thai for lunch, the same place we ate on our last trip as it was so delicious.
   Then, we tried a new museum to us - the National Building Museum. The building is amazing. It was built in the 1880s to house the records of the Civil War Veterans. It has a huge middle area with four stories of balconies and has been used for many inaugural balls. The stairs were made very wide and short to make it easier for all the disabled veterans. (The money ran out before they could add elevators, although the shafts were put in.) As everything was paper records, they had ingenious ways of moving paper in baskets along wires and dumbwaiters. The exhibitions were interesting, too. We saw prints by architects of the Art Deco age which envisioned buildings in cities. They were full of social commentary about the rise of cities, railroads.... Very striking. We also went through an interesting exhibit about buildings being able to surviving disasters such as floods, storms, earthquakes, fires. And, we saw models of fanciful buildings, some built, some not, from around the world, many from Copenhagen, interestingly.
   That evening we picked up another former student, Lizzy Skokan. She is doing an internship with Senator Jeanne Shaheen of N.H. and really enjoying it. We went to a restaurant in her part of the city, called Dumku, a Scandinavian restaurant, although the food seemed more Hungarian to us. It was another very good meal and another delightful evening with a competent, intelligent young woman. Her descriptions of what she has learned and who she has met were wonderful. She said that a lot of familiar politicians are so much shorter than they look on television.
   The next day, we drove back to New England, having had another nice trip home, one with good driving weather, although it was a bummer to abandon our shorts and sandals and have to dig out long pants, jackets and gloves.