The Big Trip, part 6: Chapel Hill, NC/Washington, DC

July 05, 2010

Now I understand why my folks had an ironclad rule of no more than 6 hours a day in the car when we were little. We only had to do about 5 hours each day, and Owen was almost unbelievably good about the whole thing, but it was still a long two days.

Chapel Hill: Barbecue, swimming in the hotel pool, and a Whole Foods for snack refills and breakfast the next morning. A quiet sort of win.

We arrived in DC too late yesterday to do anything but eat dinner and relax, but we had big plans for the 4th of July. Plans involving dinosaurs. You have to understand that for the last two days we had been hearing a near-constant refrain of "Dinosaur bones! Dinosaur bones!" Owen even made up his first joke yesterday in the car:

"Knock, knock."

"Who's there?"

"Dinosaur."

"Dinosaur who?"

"ROAAAARRRR!!!"

(This is even funnier when repeated twenty times by someone who can't actually pronounce "dinosaur" properly.)

I was frankly a little worried that the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History would fail to live up to whatever his imagination had concocted. No worries. He was, quite simply, in heaven. Dinosaur! Bones! Everywhere! Not to mention the elephant, whale, hippo, rhino, tiger, lion, bear, etc. However, we did push things a bit too far by springing for the IMAX "Dinosaurs 3D" show. Dinosaur bones = awesome; extremely loud and realistic 3D CGI dinosaurs = leaving the theater halfway through the show.

On the advice of our DC-resident companions, Kevin and Antonina, we hiked across the Mall to the Museum of the American Indian for lunch. If you are planning a visit to DC, trust me, this is where you should go. The menu for each food station in the cafe is based on (probably more like "inspired by") the indigenous cuisine of a different Native American region. I went to the Pacific Northwest counter and had steamed mussels in huckleberry-onion broth, with a wild mushroom bread pudding on the side. Yummy.

We came back to Kevin's apartment for a rest this afternoon and then went out for pizza. We had had high hopes for viewing the DC fireworks, but it became clear that we would be courting a Toddler Meltdown Disaster, so we just came home and I watched the fireworks live on the whitehouse.gov website while Eric put Owen to bed. Which brings me up to now.

It's 10:30 p.m. on our last night in the United States. Our flight leaves at 6 tomorrow evening. My next post will be from Scotland.