Washington DC Vacation Recap Day 1

I want to start recapping our vacation to DC back in September. I did posts while we were there, but I wanted to share the pictures I took and more details about what we did.

We decided to go to DC because my husband had never been there before and I knew this would be a place he'd enjoy. Also, it was a budget-friendly vacation because so many things are free in DC.

To stay under budget, we stayed outside DC in Alexandria, VA. We booked through Priceline and got a great hotel for cheaper than the budget hotels I was pricing. Fortunately, our hotel had free parking and free breakfast, so we had one free meal every day. We tried not to eat in DC because the food was expensive, especially in the museums. We ate dinners in the suburbs and used some gift cards that we'd been collecting.

We used the Metro to get into DC every day. Our hotel provided a free shuttle to the local station and was actually in walking distance (for us, anyway.) Once in the city, we pretty much walked everywhere. We used my phone for directions a lot. I love my smartphone!

Our first day of vacation was spent driving straight through to Alexandria. The trip was only supposed to take 11 hours, but we ended up hitting a traffic jam in Pennsylvania We sat there for a couple hours and then there was no explanation of why exactly. Why does that always seem to happen on road trips?

We finally got to our hotel 3 hours late and we pretty much just crashed. We had to get a good night's sleep for our first day of touring DC!