D.C.: Day One

You all know how much I love to travel. There's just something magical about walking the streets of a new city and finding adventure in unexpected places. I'm addicted to the way it makes me feel.

As was expected, my sister-in-law and I had an incredible time exploring D.C. together. We were perfect travel partners because we have similar interests and dispositions, and we share a passion for eating delicious food. Ha.

We found cheap flights on Virgin (around $100 round trip per person), and I had credit card points saved up, so we splurged on an upgraded suite at Hotel Palomar, which was phenomenal. The hotel is fairly modern and new-looking, and the rooms are beautifully decorated and comfortable. It's located in Dupont Circle, which we found to be a great home base, as it had a metro stop (crucial) and felt much more homey than the downtown area did, though it was still jam-packed with fun restaurants and coffee shops.

We covered a lot of things in three days, so I'm going to start with Day One.

{Day One:  Dupont Circle, Capitol Tour, and National Monuments}

Our flight took off at 7:15 a.m. from Dallas, which meant we were up early. But that gave us almost a full day in D.C., which ended up working out perfectly.

We arrived in D.C. around 10:45 and decided to just take the metro into town. We bought SmarTrip passes, which were so convenient, as they can be used for the metro, the bus, and the Circulator bus.

We got to the hotel, and our room wasn't ready, so we stashed our bags with the bellhop and headed out to find food. The guy checking us in had recommended GBD (Golden Brown Delicious), and it sounded intriguing and close. When we got there and discovered that the menu basically consisted of fried chicken and fresh donuts, we were sold.

The food was incredible. So incredible that I was too busy shoving it into my mouth to remember to take pictures. We shared a meal of fried chicken, creme fraiche biscuits (I died), french fries, pimento mac and cheese, and donuts (I got hot cinnamon, and Faith got lemon curd). It was all as heavenly as it sounds.

We rushed back to the metro after we finished eating to make it to our 2:00 tour of the Capitol. We went through our House representative and were so glad we did. It was just us and our representative's intern, and he was excellent.

Everything was (obviously) so historically significant. The outside and inside of the rotunda were under construction and covered with scaffolding (why does this always happen to me??), but there was still so much beauty to be found in the architecture.

We left feeling incredibly patriotic and proud to be Americans.

We finished around 4:00, and our dinner reservation wasn't until 5:30, so we took some time to walk around the national mall and see what else we could find.

Just across from the Capitol are the Supreme Court and the Library of Congress.

Arguing at the Supreme Court would probably be the pinnacle of any attorney's career, so I snapped a picture.

And then we grabbed a bench in front of the Library of Congress and rested for a little while.

We were starting to feel the early flight, but we powered on and headed to Founding Farmers for dinner. This place was recommended highly by a lot of blogs and reviews of D.C. And the food was delicious, for sure.

We had the brie farm bread to start. I can't even talk about how good this was.

Then I went with the ham and peas mac and cheese (yummy), and Faith got the prime rib, which also looked tasty. Dessert for me was the strawberry rhubarb crisp, and Faith had the blue ribbon apple pie. Both were amazing, but the apple pie was really amazing.

After we finished eating, we headed to Union Station for the Old Town Trolley tour of the monuments. More on the tour, itself, in a second, but first I should mention that Union Station is worth seeing. It's huge and pretty and filled with shops, etc. We really enjoyed walking through it.

With respect to the tour, we opted for the nighttime version because it fit in the schedule better and because we had heard that seeing the monuments by moonlight was incredible. We were not disappointed.

While the tour only includes stops at a few of the monuments, the "trolley" (it's totally a bus) goes past a lot of them, so we got a good big-picture look at D.C.

The first stop at the FDR Memorial gave us an incredible view of the Washington Monument across the water.

I'm not very skilled at nighttime photography (I was really wishing I had a tripod), but you get the idea. Gorgeous.

The Marine Corps. Memorial was incredibly touching.

And the Lincoln Memorial was . . . on another level.

I can't describe it, but I'll just say that if you're ever in D.C., go see the Lincoln Memorial at night. Just do it.

The tour finished around 10:30, and we were spent. Like totally and completely done. So we caught the metro back to the hotel and crashed.

Day two coming up . . .