Washington D.C. Weekend Day 1

My husband and I took a quick weekend trip to DC last weekend and had a great time! We’ve both been to DC many times before so we wanted to do some new things we hadn’t visited before. When we were looking for where we wanted to stay, we just happened to browse around on Airbnb. Neither of us had tried using a site like that before so we were a little nervous, but when we found this cool houseboat rental we decided to go for it. So we stayed for the weekend in our own little houseboat on the Anacostia River! 

Our host was very nice and everything went smoothly, so I’m glad we tried it out. On Saturday, the weather was beautiful and crisp, and we decided to visit a few of the Smithsonians that Patrick hadn’t gone to before. We did the Museum of Natural History, which I always enjoy. Then we went to the Museum of American History which is also awesome. You can see things like the First Lady dresses and Lincoln’s hat.

You can also see things like the original Kermit the Frog and Julia Child’s kitchen! 

After those, we stopped at the National Archives and saw the Magna Carta, the Constitution, Bill of Rights and several other documents.

Right around lunch time we arrived at Newseum, which is one of the only museums of DC I haven’t been to yet so I was excited to see it. It had great reviews on Yelp and did not disappoint. It was very well organized with a lot of interesting exhibits.

I thought the Berlin exhibit was so interesting. They had the largest collection of pieces of the Berlin wall outside of Germany.

They also had a wonderful 9/11 exhibit.

After visiting the Newseum, we were starving so we decided to get hot dogs from a street vendor on the way back down the mall. We stopped at the White House because its always a fun thing to see.

Then we walked around the Washington Monument, where people were flying kites and playing and picnicking in the grass.

You can also see the WWII Memorial and the Lincoln Memorial from the top of the hill. Many of other war memorials are at the bottom of that hill too and they’re all very neat.

At this point we had walked about 20,000 steps and were getting hungry for dinner, so we decided to head towards Chinatown because there was a ramen place I wanted to try. On the way we stopped to see Ford’s Theater (unfortunately they were closed by then so we couldn’t go on the tour).

We finally arrived at the ramen place and it was a 2 hour wait! We decided that we’d go somewhere else instead and decided on the fish market at the wharf.

It was so fun! It’s an open air seafood market with tons of variety and fresh seafood. I got crab balls with hushpuppies and Patrick got croaker. They were both delicious! 

After dinner we were so exhausted from all our walking and activities that we just grabbed an Uber back to our boat to watch some Netflix.