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Another highlight of our busy year was a trip to Washington D.C. We rented a house with some friends from our days at the Charlotte Observer — Mike and Chin Whitmer and their kids Kaili (Nate’s age) and Ryan (Viv’s age). We ate like champs and saw as much as possible in a long weekend.

We had pretty good weather, great company and put some decent mileage on our shoes. Our collection of photos from four phones in the nation’s capital for four days is really weak, but the memories are top notch. We’ll add more pics if we find some. Here’s Nate with a little more about the visit:

By Nate — D.C. was really fun. When we finally got to the city, we stopped at a crazy good seafood restaurant and ate there with our family friends who we were rooming with.

Right after we finished eating at the seafood place, the boys piled into a car and went to a Washington Nationals baseball game. It was great. I found a fifty dollar bill while we were getting our tickets checked, not to mention that we saw a few homers hit and an awesome rally by the Cubs in the ninth.
When we got to the house we were renting, we walked into town a little bit and had dinner.

The next day was my 14th birthday and we all decided to go see the Museum of Natural History, the Spy Museum and The National Archives. We stopped at the Spy Museum first, and it was kind of interesting to learn that during almost all of the world’s major conflicts throughout the past 60 years there have been actual spies in the middle of all of it.

They had us pick an alias from a bunch of different profiles. They tested you throughout your tour to see if you remembered your name, nationality, age and other things. The Museum of National History was my favorite. There were tons of cool artifacts and replicas of things that blew me away. They had replicas of human skulls from when we were starting to evolve and all through those times all the way up to where we are now, and they even compared all of the differences between people then and now. The aquatic exhibit was really interesting as well because they had life-size replicas of whale skeletons, even with skeletons of ancient aquatic dinosaurs mixed in.

In between going to these two museums, we stopped in Chinatown and ate at a fantastic noodle place (Reren). Lastly we stopped at The National Archives. I thought it was awesome that they had the actual Bill of Rights, Declaration of Independence and the Constitution still preserved in one place.

When it was time for dinner we decided to go to Graffiato, Mike Isabella’s restaurant in the city. For my birthday dinner I got a shrimp scampi. They also brought out some cannolis for desert. It was probably one of the best meals I’ve had in my life. The next day we decided to go to the national mall and the National Air and Space Museum. We went to the Air and Space Museum first. It was really nice to see planes and different aircraft through history, especially the space shuttles and things like that.

After dinner we went to the Lincoln Memorial, which was the only part of the mall we did not see that afternoon. We all took some beautiful pictures of the memorial lit up at night. The next morning, we got up and left D.C. The experience was really fun and it’s something I know I’ll remember for a long time.