Road trip day 8

The stop after aunt Mel's was Washington DC. We thought about going into NYC but realistically we  couldn't have quality time in both NYC and DC. A stop in DC won hands down over New York City.
The tough question was which way would we want to take to get from aunt Mel's to DC. This question we didn't answer until leaving the morning of day 8.

We had two choices:
Choice A- drive thru and visit Gettysburg or Choice B-drive thru and visit Philadelphia. After weighing the options we choose Independence hall in Philly.

Lesson of the day: When you can reserve tickets online to a historical site  in advance do it! Don't think because you'll arrive early you'll be fine. To this day it makes me sad to think we missed the opportunity to tour Independence hall. GRRRRR!!!!!
We did however see and walk around the square,visit the visitor center (bought Mads a t-shirt) and saw Liberty bell.

Independence hall was very cool (from the outside) and it was fun to imagine what it was like so many years ago. Parts of Independence hall were under restoration.

We walked to Washington square and visited the font and the tomb of the unknown solider.

This about wraps up our visit to Philadelphia. It was disappointing to visit a place with so much of our country's history and to see the respect around it and standards kept so low. We either have really high expectations of historical sites or we need to keep our comments to ourselves if we are the only people that feel this way.  Maybe if we could have snuck in to see Independence hall I would have fonder memories of this whole day.
 The bottom line is we'll have to return to dirty Philly someday. Visiting Gettysburg and  Independence hall is something our family will just have to do  plus we'll have to sneak in a Philly Cheesesteak seeing as we didn't get one on this trip.
We shocked a few friends when we got back home with this fact. In our defense we could have gotten one but decided to pass on it. On our way back to the parking garage there was a cart by the side of the road advertising the best cheesesteaks in town however a questionable sanitary environment plus the zero people waiting in line made us just wonder that perhaps this wasn't the place to get one.

We gave up trying to have the kids sitting upright all the time while in the car especially while they napped. I just prayed we wouldn't get in a car accident. Korbin had  a little motion sickness for a bit after leaving Philadelphia. Luckily pulling over for a half hour helped and he was fine and didn't get sick for the rest of the trip.
We can cross off visiting the not so great part of Baltimore as well (Jason might as well add it to his bucket-list since we did it) for the stops on this trip. An unexpected sight I would have rather not seen. My favorite part was telling Jason well it can't get worse...yes it could and it did. Luckily it was daytime and the car didn't break down. A little boy confirmed our fear for safety as he stopped right in front of our car at a red light and express a comment that made me lock the doors and turn on our GPS to take us wherever it wanted us to go even if we had to pay a toll.

We arrived in DC while it was daylight so we were able to see a few things from the freeway. The kids just lit up when they saw the Lincoln Memorial. It was a reminder of what a great time we were about to have and the excitement in the car.
We stayed at the Marriott Key Bridge in Arlington. We checked in, ate dinner and went to bed. We had big plans for the next day!
Post 9 of 16
Location:
New York,Philadelphia,Delaware, West Virginia,DC,???