More pictures.

If you have a Trader Joe's nearby and you like tea, go check out their blueberry green tea. I'm enjoying a cup right now, and it's weird--I don't like green tea, and I don't like fruity-flavored tea, and yet this stuff is totally hitting the spot! Weird, huh?

As I continue to catch up my pictures, here are some more from our Thanksgiving trip. We did a little bit of Black Friday shopping and went in search of some good used bookstores. We ended up in Alexandria in the late afternoon and decided to explore the downtown area, which has tons of old buildings and old homes.

This was sort of cool: when I was 13, in the spring of 1984, I got to participate in the National Spelling Bee in D.C., and all the spellers and their families got to take lots of cool tours. One evening they took us to a place called Gadsby's Tavern for dinner, one of the many places that stakes their claim to fame on the fact that George Washington stayed/slept/took a potty break there.

I remembered going to the tavern, but I had no idea where exactly it was...and then I happened to spot it as we drove down a side street:


We didn't eat there because it was pricey and the menu sounded a little too Olde English to really be good, but I did want to get a picture for posterity.

We just strolled up and down the streets and kept ducking into various shops to warm up as the sun went down and the wind picked up.

Having forsaken the colonial British pub food at Gadsby's, we decided to go with the food of Todd's ancestors, which is way more tasty--Italian food at Il Porto:

It turned out that this particular night was the town's Christmas tree lighting, so there were lots of people about, and we got to see the tree light up and the little dance/songfest they put on. It was all very festive, but sadly, it all took place after dark, so--no pictures!

In fact, checking my files, I see that this is the last of my DC pictures. We took a candlelight tour of Mount Vernon the following night, but again--it was dark and I didn't even try to get any pictures. One of my little resolutions for this year is to try to take more pictures...it seems like I got burnt out on picture-taking from my early hardcore scrapbooking days, when I had a camera basically attached to my hand at all times. Now I've gone the other way and I never get good pictures of anything! Which will become apparent when I share my Christmas pictures in a few more days.