Vacation Shutdown

It felt very cathartic and a little sad to toss out the schedule that had been pinned to our wall at home for the last month, empty our pockets of subway passes, clean out my purse of the bus schedules and the Fodor's New York City 2013 guidebook.

We shuffled onto the Amtrak train with 4 hours ahead to Washington DC.  The ride was quick thanks to Netflix, cheap little toys recently acquired from Chinatown, and a whole carload of UVA students headed back to school from Fall break, who all seemed to love ZB!

The Kelly's have once again welcomed us into their home, even though this is the typical result:

Today we took the Metro into downtown DC to find it pretty vacant in the usual tourist spots, due to the government shutdown.  Most everything was fenced off.  We saw the back of the White House:

Got pretty close to the Capitol Building:

And did some sight-seeing and general goofing around, in between:

Here the kids are doing gymnastics and yoga in front of the beautiful but quiet EPA building:

I am glad the kids got to spend one more night playing with their cousins, and hope to see them again soon!