“What an excellent day for an exorcism.”

in the morning we managed to collect ourselves and get out of the house by 8-ish so we could start on our drive to washington dc. it was only about 4 hours to get there which basically seemed like nothing at this point, and the drive definitely flew by. lucy’s friend kristin lives just outside of the city, so she recommended going to the georgetown area for lunch, which we did. we found a lovely french bistro and had probably some of the best food of the trip. seriously, none of us could shut up about it.

lucy’s french onion soup and cappuccino:

mariel’s chicken caeser:

alyson’s mushroom and swiss omelette:

so good.

that little area was very cute. very cute. unfortunately, museums generally close too early, and the one we wanted to go to was no exception. so we took a couple of pictures and headed back to the car. we went to the hirshhorn museum (part of the smithsonian) and saw a cool exhibit that was all about dreams vs reality in the form of film. very cool. and dark. we bought some artsy things at the gift shop before they closed, and then realized we had missed an entire floor. their basement level is now dedicated to contemporary new artists, so that stuff was really great, too. there was one artist, mary coble, who had a piece up that was truly remarkable. click here to see an article about it. there were some other videos and some great sculptures (a wheelchair with a bike attached to the back of it, for example), too. the museum overall was actually pretty great.

but then it closed and we didn’t really know what to do with ourselves, so we hung out on museum mall, a grassy area with a carousel and… grass. but it was really cold out (or it was to us, as we’d been experiencing 80 degree weather for the past week and a half), and we had a few hours to kill before kristin got out of work, so we decided to go to the movies! mariel STILL had never seen ‘juno’, and it just so happened to be playing an hour later right near us, so we hooked it up. she liked it.

and then we met up with kristin in “chinatown” (i put that in quotes because technically that’s the name of it, but it did NOT smell bad, and i did NOT get creepily approached by 57 people trying to sell me discount prada, so i don’t really believe it…) and after getting tooootally denied by the tapas place we originally wanted to go to (who closes at 930??), we ended up going to a thai place nearby. we were literally the only people in the place, so it was creepy and nice at the same time. and the dinner was delicious (have i said a bad thing about a meal so far? hmm…).

kristin very generously gave us a ride back to our car, and we said our goodbyes to her AND to the city.

the original plan was to stay at kristin’s house overnight and drive back to new york today, but we decided to switch things up a little bit again. just to keep you guys on your toes.