May-time madness

May has been a busy and fun month, with the family descending on us for their first trip to see us in our new surroundings. With that, it was finally time to hit some of the major sights that we’d been saving up since September. I guess we managed to make it through pretty much the whole shopping list: the Jefferson and Lincoln Memorials, a tour of the Capitol Building, going up the Washington Monument (the obelisk), a couple of the major museums – Air and Space for Dad and Natural History for Peter, and last but not least, the White House (only from outside this time).

I have to say that I’m in a very privileged location to be have all this on my doorstep. There’s a lot of history here, and my knowledge is sorely lacking. It seems the British educational establishment is still fighting to brush this whole ‘unfortunate episode’ under the carpet.. Here we are visiting Mount Vernon, the home of George Washington.

Thankfully we also had enough time to chill some and show them the more relaxing, mundane side of life here. In many ways, this is my favourite part of being here – weird road layouts, the products in the supermarkets, lots of ‘culinary discovery’!

One of these activities was to plant our little balcony garden, which so far counts a flowering gardenia bush, fledgling tomato plant with one green tomato, and some delicious home-grown basil and mint. It’s the small things that really make the difference…

We only left the area once for a day excursion to the Shenandoah National Park, famous for its Skyline Drive – a road which wends its way along the crest of the Blue Ridge Mountains in the West of the state at heights of up to 3680 ft. It was very picturesque in the sun, and we were even lucky enough to see a couple of black bears (thankfully from in the car!) and half a dozen deer.

In all, I drove over 300 miles that day. Still, I find I’m enjoying driving on the wrong ;-) side of the road. The hardest part so far has been getting used to automatics. I find my left foot gets jealous at being left out, though it’s slowly getting used to retirement! We’ll certainly miss the hire car. Life without one here is hard – as me and Peter discovered when we were refused service attempting to walk through a McDonalds drive-thru late at night!

In all seriousness though, it’s great being able to go out at a moment’s notice or just see where the wind takes you. Walking over a motorway junction to get somewhere is not fun!

The highlight of the holiday was Mum’s 60th birthday and Mum & Dad’s 36th wedding anniversary, which we celebrated with a nighttime dinner cruise on the Potomac River – verrray swish!!

Actually, sorry to upstage you Mum, but perhaps the biggest thing was that WE’RE HAVING A BABY!! The lucky boy/girl will be arriving on the scene in early January, and Mom-&-Dad-to-be are very happy. There – how’s that for a big ending?!

Mark & Karen xx