The Long Drive Home

Seeing as we had to drive across the country anyway, we decided to take a little detour down to D.C. After all, who knows when we'll be on the east coast again? (Our excuse for all of our adventures). On the way down, we made sure to go through Amish country, and I have to say I was very excited to see real live Amish people.

We tried driving through Lancaster first, but soon realized that we needed to go more to the countryside to find them, so we drove to Bird-in-Hand and saw tons of them! Those Amish are so cute with their little buggies and hats and suspenders.

Most of the pictures I took were as we drove by, which is why they're kinda fuzzy. They don't like you taking pictures of them though, so I figured I had to do it as we drove so they wouldn't know about it, and then they couldn't be mad at me!

Pennsylvania was beautiful and full of green hills and trees. The more we drove, the more we found there are a lot of green places! Basically Utah and the midwest are just severely lacking. As we drove down the freeway, all we could see were trees everywhere. But then we came around a curve and BAM! D.C. temple right in front of us. Pretty cool to see.

We only had a couple days to see D.C., so we only really got to see the National Mall area, but with all the Smithsonian museums, that still left a lot to see! We spent the whole first day and part of the second looking at museums, and then walked the loop around the mall to see all the monuments, the White House, and the Capitol.

As you can see, D.C. is a little bit sweaty. We Utahns don't fare so well in that kind of humidity, I guess it takes some getting used to.

The best picture we got of the White House was actually taken from the Washington Monument, because when you go up close, you're stuck behind a fence with a bunch of shrubs and can't see much.

At the capitol we stumbled upon a Herman Cain rally, which was surprisingly entertaining. He used some very descriptive words when talking about Obama and liberals. Like, "dumb" lol.

We stayed with Adam's great-aunt Clara while we were there and she was such a great hostess. We would go out to stay with her again right now if we could!

After leaving Virginia, we met some very interesting people in West Virginia. A lot of them looked like this guy...who is sitting on the porch of a gas station. Quite the looker, huh?

Our next tour stop was the Gateway Arch. You ride to the top in what are basically tin cans, which made big guys like Adam feel a little claustrophobic. He had to hunch a little to keep his head from bumping the top.

We ended up with a couple extra hours when we got to Kansas City, MO, so we thought we'd see what they had in Independence. We found the Community of Christ HQ and temple, so we went in to get a little tour. Their beliefs are very interesting when you think about how they are a split from Mormonism and still have the Book of Mormon as scripture.

We also found Liberty jail, which is inside of a visitors' center. This is the actual jail, but it's mostly been rebuilt because it was all made of wood, so it was in pretty bad shape.

Everywhere we went that day, people kept asking if we were there for the temple open house. Being the good Mormons we are, we didn't even know a new temple was open there ;) but we figured we might as well go while we were there, so we drove over and took the tour.

Once we got through Missouri, we were in dreary Kansas, so the rest of our trip was pretty boring, but we finally made it home!