Sunday 23 June 2013

Washington DC and US Open Weekend

Two weekends ago, we had a great long weekend planned. We started on Friday morning with our first Amtrak train ride to Washington DC. It's so cool to be close enough to the city to take a short ride to get there. Both the Philly and DC train stations are historic and beautiful buildings - we enjoyed exploring them both.

Friday also happened to be our first tropical storm - thanks "Andrea" - so our baseball game was rained out, but we were able to enjoy a couple museums, and exchange our tickets for Saturday's game. The Nationals were playing the Twins so we wanted to be sure to make it to the series so we could cheer them on once this season! (And we weren't the only ones: there were Twins jerseys all over town and cheering at the game!)

Saturday ended up being a beautiful day and we walked all over the city enjoying it. We did the memorial walk on the National Mall and actually hoofed it all the way to the ballpark, so we got to see the waterfront area of town as well. Last time we were in the city, we stayed in a different neighborhood a bit outside of the center of town, but this time, we were just a couple blocks from the White House, which was very convenient if a bit surreal.
Walking the monuments

First time seeing the MLK monument - really cool!

Cheering on the Twins at the ballpark!
On Monday, we went to the US Open practice round! Mike found out a couple months ago that the US Open was going to be played at a course only about 10 miles from us, so we had to take advantage of the opportunity! We had another VERY rainy day, but brought our umbrellas and ponchos and were able to walk the most of the course, and see a lot of players. It was pretty awesome to be able to see the pros take practice shots and give autographs to the fans. Because we spent so much time there on Monday we were invested to watch throughout the week too, which was really fun. Well, Mike would have watched anyway, but I joined in. :)
Excited to be there!

We accidentally happened on Tiger's practice round 5 minutes after walking in - what luck!
Philly went all out for the tourney and had a special event going on on Independence Mall. They had practice greens set up and a simulator for fans to try out, and a jumbo tron of the event too.  They even had a golf cart racing video game. I kicked Mike's butt - quite possibly the first time I've beat him at a video game before - ha!