Well, after no or little sleep after last night's concert, we all met at school at 4am! Actually, everyone made it, and there were no issues. The bus was there - bus driver Brian left on time at 4:30 to deliver us to PDX. Thankfully there were no plane issues (the plane my family was scheduled to go on got canceled... thank goodness that didn't happen to the tour!).
We flew into Dulles airport on time - we had one 'first time flyer' - Andrew C - who was very happy the plane took off and landed easily! Our wonderful DC tour guide LaVerna and bus driver Mr. Daniels met us at the airport, with Jimmy Johns box lunches! All the luggage made it and we were off to the monuments. We did a driving/walking tour of Constitution Ave, Pennsylvania Ave (yes, we drove past 1600 Pennsylvania twice), the Capitol (the flag was flying over the Senate house so we knew they were in session), and the monuments - we walked the beautiful Korean War monument, the Lincoln, and the Vietnam. LaVerna is a wonderful tour guide - she knows the city so well and has been giving us tons of history and tidbits about what we're seeing. Here are some Ms S-centric pictures (as a group we've all taken a ton of other pics - ask the kids to show you!):
At the Lincoln Memorial. It was really amazing to see this beautiful sculpture - and the Gettysburg address on the wall to the left, and the imprint of the "I Have a Dream" speech on the front steps...
At the Capitol... (wow, there's a dome... cool!)
At the Korean War memorial...
After the touring, we went back to Virginia to our hotel. Nice hotel - beautiful big rooms - suites! And, even though everyone was a little tired, we had a really productive combined group rehearsal. At 10:30pm the pizzas came, and then it was time for lights out - or at least rooms were closed down - at 11:15pm. Chamber will be up at 7:30am for rehearsal, and the whole group leaves the hotel tomorrow at 8:30am for a great day of sight-seeing, concert going, and performing! More blogging tomorrow...
~Ms S
