The Adventures of Jim & Rhonda

Here we are in our capital, it took us a lot of years to get here! First of all, on our 2nd full day in Charleston we first headed out to Magnolia Plantation to tour the gardens and walk through the amazing swampland area. Luckily,it was a bit overcast so very muggy but not more than 93 degrees or so. After that we headed to Mount Pleasant to tour the USS Yorktown, an aircraft carrier used both in WWII and Vietnam (as well as a few movies) and was really fascinating. Neither of us had been on one before and it’s really amazing how large those ships are as well as how complicated they are to operate. We also took some time to go down into a submarine and that life is unimaginable to me, it takes someone very special to be willing to live in that close of quarters!

For dinner we headed to Jestines Kitchen which we’d read about in Lonely Planet as well as a few magazines. It’s a tiny place and we waited in line around 45minutes to get in but it was well worth it! Named after Jestine Matthews, who lived to be 112yrs old, and owned by the daughter of the family she worked for , it is low country cooking at it’s best! Jim had blackened pork chops topped by roasted tomatoes and horseradish cream sauce and I had the best fried chicken anywhere and we both had table wine (southern talk for sweet tea) and the steamed cabbage and butter beans. We practically rolled home but it was the perfect finale to our time in the south.

We had a long drive up to Williamsburg, Va and checked into a pretty nasty Super 8 motel. But, it was clean, the cheapest in town,  and only 1 night so what the heck! We went for dinner to Tequila Rose mexican kitchen for dinner. Jim had chorizo burritos that were ok but I had a fantastic carnitas (pork marinated in herbs and beer and slow cooked) w/ beans & rice. yummy! The next morning we headed out for sightseeing. We had planned on seeing all 3 towns (Williamsburg, Yorktown & Jamestown) but found ourselves spending hours just in Williamsburg. It’s a fascinating place with 312 acres of traditional houses & shops, locals dressed in traditional colonial garb, and re-enactments of historical events…basically, we had a ball so we never made it to Yorktown or Jameston…oh well, maybe next time because we had to get up to Washingon DC.

DC is known for being an expensive hotel town, however, about 2 weeks ago Jim found the Washington Court Hotel for us on Orbitz.com for only $99/night! The hotel is a 4* hotel, about 3 blocks from the Capital and pretty nice. Of course, we’re paying through the bum for parking & internet use but after walking past the Willard hotel today and seeing THEIR parking is $8 /hr or $65 /day I don’t feel so bad! That first night we didn’t get here until about 7pm so pretty much just checked in, ordered a pizza, had a couple of gin & tonics and watched the olympics in bed..overall not a bad evening! Plus, we are blessed with having great weather! DC has been in the upper 90’s for weeks and during our time here it’s been in the low-mid 80s..lovely.

Ok, first full day in DC…what to do??? One truly amazing thing about this town is that all of the Smithsonian musums are free, thats right FREE FREE FREE…I’ve got to say we haven’t seen much of that so far on this road trip in the good old USA. We started out by walking to the Capital which is completely surrounded by police and chose not to wait in the extremely long line for the free tour. Walking down the mall we first stopped at the Air & Space Musuem to spend a few hours, next up was the original Smithsonian – now known as the Castle- for lunch before continuing along to the Freer Gallery, a lovely small gallery with mostly Asian & Islamic art.

From there we went to the US Holocaust Museum…what an amazing place. Jim & I are fortunate (or unfortunate) enough to have been to many Holocaust sites throughout the world and it was heartening to see how well it was documented and laid out in this museum. It was heart wrenching and informative and moving and we left there completely worn out.

We did walk down to the Washington & Lincoln Memorials, the reflecting pool, WWII memorial and Vietnam memorial and finally staggered back to our hotel 10 hours after our day began! We simply could not move so it was room service and bed.

Today, up and out again! We had to wait in a very long line at Starbucks for coffee, amazing to us until we realized we had seen very few Starbucks..it’s certainly not like home where there is one on every other block. After coffee we walked to the White House to get as close as possible (which is not very these days), then off to the Natural History Museum, one of the highlights of the trip. We spent almost 5 hours exploring this amazing place..it’s huge and really well done and I still can’t believe it’s free! Next up, the very interesting International Spy Museum….it was packed, which surprised me a bit, but very interesting and had a lot of hands on displays. By then it was 6pm and, exhausted once again, we drug ourselves across the street to Gordon Biersch brewery for a restorative beer & some dinner. Back at our hotel at 7:45pm after another really great day.

Tomorrow, we are going to Arlington Cemetery in the morning before starting our trip back West…So far it’s been a great trip and we’ve been having a ball! I will say, one thing that struck me here in Washington was how lucky we are to have traveled around the world to all of the many countries we’ve been too. With the exception of Japan, pretty much everything that we saw at the museums was from countries we’ve been to and seen the sights first hand. Pretty amazing.

That is it for now, we’ll update again soon and until then we hope you’re all living the dream as well! Love, J&R

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