Are We There Yet? Arlington

DAY SIXTEEN:  ARLINGTON

It was hot.  We were exhausted.  The chocolate cheerios that we had for dinner last night left our energy levels sagging a little.  But we were in Arlington.  We couldn’t just sit in the hotel room the whole day.  Even though Shaggy and I wanted to, the kids were bouncing off the walls by midmorning.

So we decided to walk over to the Marine Corp memorial.  It was only a few blocks from the hotel.  But we were completely drenched by the time we got there.  Hello humidity!

We also found a tunnel park that the kids enjoyed exploring.

This child would not sit in the stroller until later in the day.  She much preferred to push it.  I don't know why she would be avoiding buckles.

Since we were already sticky, stinky, sweaty and tired, we figured that we might as well walk a few more blocks over to Arlington Cemetery.  My grandparents are buried there and I thought it would be cool to do a little detective work with the kids and find their graves.  It was a long, long walk.  A lot longer than it looked from the beginning.  Arlington is enormous.  We had to go see the women’s memorial just for a break from the oppressive heat.  Discovering this flag room was just a perk. 

The nice lady at the help desk was able to locate my grandparents’ plots even though I gave her names other than what was inscribed on their headstones.  I love researchers like that.  Fortunately for us, their graves were just up the hill from where we would have to walk back to the hotel.  If they had been the other direction, we would have had a mutiny on our hands.  Even though we had a map, and the graves were marked with a nice red X, it was still a little tricky to find them.  They didn’t exactly stick to the plan in this section of the cemetery.  Finally, S came through and found the right spot.

 On the long walk back to the hotel, we dealt with multiple meltdowns, several tantrums and a whole lot of blaming and bickering.  We cooled off at the hotel for a bit before heading out to dinner.  We were feeling brave and decided to actually go to a sit down place.

Yeah, that lasted a whole 3 minutes.  B was having none of it.  She was screaming and crying and calling for Mama! even though I was sitting right next to her.  I would really have liked to sit there and enjoy a nice dinner with my family, but she didn’t really leave me that option.  We left so we didn’t ruin dinner for the whole entire restaurant of patrons.  I was stuck with carryout later that night.

B and I wandered around a little and found some cool places to explore.  It was after business hours, so everything other than the hotels and restaurants were deserted.  It was like our own personal park.  I’m so glad we took the time to wander.  It let me purge my frustration and saved me from a hotel pity party. 

Once we finally made it back to the hotel, B had a little jungle gym session while we waited for our carryout.  I’d say she really needed that outlet.

I’m glad that tomorrow is the Sabbath and we get to rest from both sightseeing and sit down restaurants.  We’ll see what the day brings, because we’re not there yet.