We slept in and awoke to more rain. It made little difference to us, however. In fact, it almost enhanced our lazy morning and leisurely breakfast. Jean and Alan prepared a feast! We had a huge bowl of Alan’s famous fruit salad, plus Jean made waffles and scrambled eggs. We hung out, visited and played with the dogs until finally it was time to head to the city. Our first stop was the local Safeway, where we stocked up on groceries for the week, plus Steve bought an umbrella. It was far easier to shop in the Virginia suburbs where there is plenty of free parking than to try to find a market in downtown DC.
The house we had rented for the week was on Capitol Hill, just a couple blocks from the Capitol building. It’s an old, classic, three bedroom DC row house on a shady street just one street south of the House office buildings. Although the floors were creaky, the house was very comfortable and the neighborhood quiet. It wasn’t nearly as spacious and luxurious as Jean and Alan’s house, but it had everything we needed, including parking, which is rare.
Sunday afternoon was too rainy to consider going up in the Washington Monument, which was our intended first tourist stop. To go up in the Washington Monument during tourist season (mid-March through August), you need to order timed tickets online three months in advance. Since I was admittedly a bit compulsive about my planning, I had ordered five sets of tickets to the Washington Monument, on five different days, so we knew we had several other opportunities and could wait for better weather. We had also planned to bicycle around the monuments and memorials on the National Mall that evening, but we postponed that activity in hopes the weather would clear later in the week.
After we got settled at the house, all of us but Evan put on our rain jackets, grabbed our umbrellas and took a walk over past the Capitol, the Supreme Court and the Library of Congress – all in our immediate neighborhood! There were a few other tourists out and about, but it was pretty deserted. Evan had a deadline looming that evening for the course he is taking and needed to spend his time working rather than wandering around in the rain. When we returned to the house, we ordered pizza from We the Pizza, which we had discovered on an earlier trip to DC, and watched the Golden State Warriors lose to the Thunder – boo!
Photos of our rental house on Capitol Hill (it was raining when we arrived - the photos below are from the VRBO website)
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