Vacation

Is there anything better than being on vacation with the one you love? Especially when you don't get to see that person very often! I spent a week with Susan in Washington D.C., staying with my brother who lives just outside the city. We saw a lot of the museums and monuments that are there. We saw both Air and Space Museums (there's a new one at Dulles airport), the Natural History, the Hirshhorn and Sculpture Garden, the National Portrait Gallery, and the Holocaust museum. It was a busy few days with a lot of walking, but it was a lot of fun and very interesting. We set no itinerary, just tried to get up at a reasonable time (a challenge after walking all day), head to the Metro station to ride into downtown, and go through the museums at whatever pace we wanted. I was very happy to discover that we both had about the same pace of going through, and neither was pushing the other or dragging along. We didn't get to see everything (an impossible task for one vacation), but saw the stuff we really wanted to. We also spent some time with my family and just relaxing. It was a really nice balance of doing a lot of stuff, resting, and spending time with my family.

On Thursday we went hiking to Annapolis Rock, which is on the Appalachian Trail and is where my profile picture was taken. I had gone there with my brother last year and couldn't wait to go back with Susan. It was a beautiful day in the 70s (the rest of the week had been in the 50s or colder) and we had a great time. I had really wanted a picture of us on the rock, so we had brought a tripod along to do that. We got it all set up, I set the timer, and ran to stand next to Susan. As I got there, a gust of wind picked up the tripod and blew it over the edge of the cliff. We watched helplessly as my camera tumbled 60 feet over the rocks. I realized that all the pictures from that week were on the memory card in the camera, so I had to go get it. I was able to climb down and retrieve the camera and tripod. The camera was relatively in one piece except for a few cosmetic pieces. I did a little messing around with it and it does still work, although the focus is really bad and you can tell that the gears with the lens are messed up. I'm not hopeful that it will work, but I'm having fun playing around with it. I'm more disappointed that we couldn't get that picture than I am about losing the camera. It was a decent but cheap camera, and there were several things I didn't really like about it. And it wasn't anyone's fault it got broken.

The next day we drove to Florida for our Church Retreat. It is always a great weekend and it was really nice to see the rest of my friends again. The long week with lots of walking (concluded by 4 hours of hiking) was really starting to catch up with me, so I was really tired. But it was still a great time. I'm really looking forward to moving back there in about a month.