My parents came to visit us for Spring Break, instead of going to Panama City Beach or South Padre Island and doing beer bongs and dancing all night at Foam Parties. When they come to visit, it’s like we’re on vacation too—lots of fun, tons of laughing and no work.
They’ve visited many times, and they’ve seen the Smithsonian Museums and Monuments quite enough. So rather than tour the city again, we went on a few day trips outside of DC. It’s so cool that we can drive an hour east and see the Chesapeake Bay, or drive an hour west and be in the rolling countryside of Virginia, complete with cows, goats and barns. The only tricky part about doing day trips during the week was timing it just right so that we avoided the worst of the traffic. Sometimes that meant leaving early, and sometimes we took back roads and got just a teensy bit lost.
Day 1: Harpers Ferry, West Virginia for Civil War site-seeing; Breaux Vineyards in Purcellville, Virginia for a wine tasting, and Leesburg, Virginia for lunch, coffee and shopping. Chinese dinner at Foong Lin in Bethesda.
Day 2: Annapolis, Maryland for site-seeing, across the Bay Bridge for lunch at Hemingway’s, back across the bridge to Sandy Point State Park, a Japanese dinner at Tako Grill in Bethesda. (I love Tako Grill!) We had sushi, tempura, dumplings, noodle soup and grilled baby octopus (complete with heads attached—I guess that means I ate baby octopus brains and eyeballs. They were crunchy and slippery.)
Day 3: Manassas, Virginia to see the Bull Run/Manassas Civil War Battlefield, Chrysalis Vineyards in Middleburg, Virginia for a wine tasting (bonus: our friend Maggie’s mom was the pourer!), and lunch and shopping in Middleburg. We even found homemade marshmallows from a little store in Middleburg.
I tried to get them to stay another day, but they have, like, responsibilities or something.