No extended travelogue on this trip, but here's a quick synopsis.  Thumbnails are below; click for a full-size image.

I drove from Indianapolis to Gettysburg on Valentine's Day, leaving town first thing after a desperately needed haircut.  The drive was uneventful, aside from catching a piece of flying gravel in my windshield from a truck on the PA Turnpike that turned into a crack a few days later.  Got to Gettysburg around 8, had dinner with Phyllis at a period restaurant called the Farnsworth House.  Good food--I had the game pie, which Phyllis informed me was one of my grandfather's favorite dishes.  We stayed up late talking.

The next morning after breakfast, we went to see my grandparents' old house on Hay Street, took a look at the seminary, then drove around the battlefield, with an extended stop at Devil's Den, where my brother and I played games of hide and seek when we were kids.  A group of four or five children were now doing the same.  We made a brief stop at the cemetery to visit my grandparents' graves.  We discussed the demise of the Gettysburg Tower, a monstrous tower built in the '80s with a view over the battlefield.  My grandmother was a fervent opponent of its construction, but ended up being buried in its shadow.  Some 15 years later, the tower was demolished, much to my grandmother's relief, I'm sure.  Since I had just gotten a promotion at work, we stopped at the new outlet mall to buy dress shirts (since I graduated out of business casual land), then had Chinese for lunch.  Phyllis sent me off with a bag of chocolate chip cookies and I hit the road for Alexandria.

I made pretty good time to Alexandria.  Aunt Kate and I went and got takeout from an Austrian/Italian restaurant down the street, and stopped to buy some beer.  Kate, my mother's youngest sister but still a fair bit older than me, got carded and didn't have her ID, so I had to supply the legal proof.  We got home, had dinner.  Kate, Edson, and the kids went to bed early; Grandma and I stayed up and watched the US-Finland hockey game.  Finland played a good first period, then got slaughtered the rest of the game.

In the morning Grandma and I went to mass at the National Cathedral, and tried to go to the Lincoln Memorial, but couldn't find parking.  I got completely lost on the way back to Alexandria--in the midst of this, Dad called. I picked up, skipping hello and going straight to, "So what do you know about the Jefferson Davis Highway?"

I headed up to Rockville to visit a friend of mine from college.  After talking with her and her parents for a while, we left, having a cup of coffee at Starbucks and then an amazing dinner at Bombay Bistro.  We went back to her place, talked and listened to music for a while (she introduced me to the amazing Beta Band), then headed out to Dupont Circle.  After wandering around for a while, we found a club called Cobalt and went there.  My friend turned out to be one of maybe five women in the bar, which was a little awkward, but we had a pretty decent time anyway.  I got back to Alexandria around 3am, and slept till 11.

Kate, Edson, Michaela, Bridget and I drove out to Mt. Vernon and wandered around the grounds.  The sky was clear, but it was cold and windy.  Since we came late in the day, we were rushed through the house.  The people behind us were giving a running commentary of everything we saw--the woman commenting on how cute everything was, the man giving Rush Limbaugh style punditry--most memorably in the library.  The tour guide pointed out a late-1700s globe original to the house, adding that George Washington's foreign policy was to avoid all foreign entanglements to build the new country.  "Too bad we don't do that now," the man said loudly.  "Well," the tour guide said, deftly avoiding political entanglements with tourists, "the more things change, the more they stay the same, don't they?"

We went back home.  I cooked dinner, watched the Olympics with Grandma for a while, then went on to bed.  The next morning I left around ten, making it back to Indianapolis in 9-1/2 hours.
 

statue on the battlefield.	cannons	Eisenhower's farm	Little Round Top	Little Round Top
Little Round Top	Phyllis at Little Round Top	Devil's Den	Devil's Den	Devil's Den
Phyllis	Grandma at the National Cathedral	National Cathedral	National Cathedral	National Cathedral
National Cathedral	National Cathedral	Jana grabs the camera; here I am	Here I am again	...and again
Mt. Vernon	Mt. Vernon	Mt. Vernon	Mt. Vernon	Mt. Vernon
Mt. Vernon	Michaela	Grandma with the kids	Grandma and Bridget