Vacation Pre-Game

We are leaving tomorrow after lunch for Virginia Beach!!!  We will spend five nights there and come home on Friday.  We are SOOO excited to have a little getaway, and to just relax as a family :)  Anyways, we started our vacation a bit early with a fun outing this afternoon/evening: we took a 45-minute cruise along the Potomac to see the major monuments and some other notable sites.  I had bought a Living Social deal where the cruise was only $7/person instead of $14.  Jackson didn't need a ticket, so we thought that was a great deal!  The cruises are run by DC Cruises, and we had such a  good time!!!  The above picture is of Jackson hanging out at the harbor waiting for our boat.  He had a grand time watching the ducks :)

This is a picture of our boat!  It wasn't very big, but it was perfect--we could see out of all of the sides and feel a great breeze from the river.  We left our house after naptime and made it in time for the 5:45 cruise.  Jackson was really hesitant to get on the boat, but he ended up LOVING it!!!  

 This was how Jackson spent much of the cruise: checking on the waves our boat was making :)  He also was sure to point out each airplane that flew overhead...

 I've never had this view of the Lincoln and Washington Monuments!

 We are in a bit of a rainy patch, but today actually turned out to be beautiful!

 A peek at the Jefferson Memorial

 Navy-Marine Memorial: there are seven seagulls to represent the seven seas and the memorial is dedicated to the Navy and Merchant Marine who died at sea in World War I

 We cruised by the Pentagon, and on the way we passed lots of boats parked in their slips.  Jackson loved looking at them, but he informed us, "I don't want to park that."  He said it so seriously, but it came out of NOWHERE!

 The views were really pretty--it was so neat to do something we had never done before in DC!

LOVE this picture of my two JASes :)

After our tour ended we headed over to BGR Burger Joint in Old Town Alexandria for dinner to use up two Groupons!  LOL  We have bought some great stuff on Groupon and Living Social, but the latest batch is expiring all at once!  We hadn't been to BGR yet, but had heard pretty good things.  Our overall rating is probably a C.  I did not care for the atmosphere at all!  It was a pretty crowded space for the volume of business they had, but the decorations, acoustics, and music did not make for a peaceful dining experience.  At least for me.  Josh had a beef burger and I had a veggie burger.  The veggie burger was really good, but Josh's was quite a good hamburger!  The fries were super disappointing :(  We did like that they had a slightly more expanded menu than Five Guys (shakes, for instance), but we didn't see any reason to quit frequenting Five Guys!  There were a few tables around us that seemed to be serving tourists, and we did agree that if we were staying in Old Town, for instance, this would be a great choice.  We didn't feel like we were given full disclosure about how to use our Groupons, so we ended up spending more additional money than we had planned since we had already bought a portion of our food, but that's ok.  I won't blame the whole restaurant for that miscommunication...

We had such a fun family outing--we definitely would like to do the Mini-Monument Cruise again when we have visitors.  I was thrilled we only paid $7, but we feel like it would be worth full price too :)