I know I've talked a lot about how hot it was on our trip, but you don't really know heat until you've taken a vacation that takes place primarily outside, with a lot of walking, huge crowds, and six kids to keep alive (not to mention my own self who is every bit my mothers daughter when it comes to heat). Check the weather records if you don't believe me, but today it was every bit of 107 degrees out there. Brutal.
Patrick's graduation (which was really great, as are all Marine Corps ceremonies), was outside on the parade deck. I don't know if you know anything about parade decks, but there is no shade. There is, however, a lot of black pavement. As hot as I was in my sleeveless cotton dress guzzling the water and fanning myself incessantly, I couldn't help but feel sorry for those candidates and Marines out there in their uniforms. After a while the littlest guys and I sought the shade of a nearby building. We hadn't been there very long when a Marine approached us and said, "Ma'am, I don't mean to be a pest but I don't want you and your babies getting too hot out here. Mind if I give you a few ice packs?" I told him he could pester me with ice packs all day long. Eli took that thing out of my hands and plopped it right on his head.
After graduation, being the gluttons for punishment that we are, we decided to head back into DC to finish off our "must see" list. If we could do it all over again, we would leave the Museum of American History off of the list since it was a ridiculously crowded mass of people, sprinkled with a few thieves who were looking for an iPhone to steal. We had inched our way through exactly one exhibit before we realized Jimmy's phone had been nabbed and then spent the next hour trying to track it down. Gone. Never to be turned on again (thus making our fancy Find My Phone app useless).
There was, however, one good thing about the crazy heat. Most people were hunkering down in the various museums, leaving the sidewalks of the city pretty open for the lunatics like us who were not about to let a little thievery ruin our day. (Basically that just means we swore off crowded buildings from then on, lest it be one of our children who disappeared into the masses instead of just a phone and we used the empty sidewalks to sell a long, hot walk to our kids). It worked, and in the end we had a great day seeing the White House up close, the Veitnam Memorial Wall, the Lincoln Memorial, the WWII Memorial and the Washington Monument. Yes, that's a lot of walking. But we took full advantage of the various sprinklers that had been set up throughout the city, which was practically an exhibit in themselves according to our kids.
So despite record heat, a stolen phone and have I mentioned car trouble on the way home? yeah, there was that (three cheers for a handy husband who kept us rolling on!), it was a really wonderful trip. I'm already looking forward to going again in a few years (in the dead of winter) and Ben and Jack are already saving their money for their own swords.