Memorial Day Weekend Wrap-Up

As if the Naval Academy Graduation and Navy Wedding weren't enough for the weekend, we also made a few detours in our roadtrip. That's one advantage to driving instead of flying. Though it was a long drive - over 1600 miles were driven since Thursday afternoon!

When we left Annapolis on Sunday, we took a friend of the family to the airport. She happened to fly in and out of Reagan International, while everyone else flew in and out of Baltimore. So she was kind of stranded without a ride back to the airport. Since Eric and I drove, we were able to detour over to Washington DC to drop her off there. Since we were 'right there' anyway, we decided to hit the surface streets and see a few sights on a driving tour. Being Memorial Day weekend, it was busy, including a Bike Rally show support for POW/MIA. But it wasn't as busy as we thought it would be... maybe we just managed to get in and out at the right time. Or maybe we just hit the right areas of the City that weren't busy!

From there, it was off to see Nan in Pennsylvania! This detour was planned. We made plans with Nan to come by for a late lunch/early dinner. We figured the short detour would be nice and Eric got to see the "thriving metropolis" of Shamokin, PA. We had a nice dinner with Nan and her cousin, Jean. It's always nice to catch up with relatives. We drove by my Mom's childhood home, as well as Nan's childhood home. After some more chatting on nan's front porch, Eric and I were on our way. But not without one more detour... I had to go to Knoebel's Grove to reminisce and show Eric what of my fondest memories of summers in PA!
With our earlier DC detour, we were behind what we had hope to be in any sort of schedule we had. But we still drove out to Elysburg to visit Knoebels. We got there right at dusk. I wasn't planning on any rides, but we did the Sky Lift so get a good overall view of the park, and then Eric wanted to do the boats - I don't know of any other park that had actual boats you can steer through a little circular canal. He was amazed they still had some of the rides they did - they just don't make them like that anymore! It was a fun little detour, even though we stayed a little longer than anticipated.

We finally got back on the road and pushed ourselved pretty hard into the early AM hours to get as far as Pittsburgh. We got to the hotel and crashed close to 2am! But even the late night didn't cause any regrets in our detours. They made the trip all that much better! So after our 6-7 hours of sleep, we were up again... and decided on another quick detour... Ikea! This one wasn't as big of s detour - only about 20 minutes from the hotel we were at. So we ran over, grabbed lunch there, and picked up a few things for the house and our wedding decor. And then it was finally time for the last leg of our trip home. I was still exhausted from the day before and had a hard time keeping my eyes open! So I was in and out of snooze mode throughout the 5 hours home... no amount of caffeine seemed to help. But we made it home!

So this weekend, though long periods of time spent in the car, was quite a fun one!! Eric and I had a good time and now know we can do the long haul car trips together - our longest trip before was to Chicago... otherwise, we've flown everywhere!

I know I only posted a few pictures here, but you can see more from the whole weekend on my Fotki page... There's a lot because I was playing with my new camera Eric got me for my wedding present - a Nikon D-90!! I already love it, but there's still a lot to learn on it!