I had my annual trip to Washington D.C. for a work conference. I was in charge of registration and whatever else they needed help with. Including travel, I worked a total of 71 hours last week and I'm exhausted. The conference turned out great, although our numbers were a little low compared to other years due to the economy. I stayed at the Hyatt Regency Crystal City. This is what my room looked like.
Besides all the hours I worked, I was able to manage a little fun time. First of all, on Sunday evening, my nephew Scott picked me up at the hotel and took me to his house. He and his friend, Jenny, had prepared a wonderful meal for me and it tasted so good after a long day of travel.
Tuesday Evening was the Conference opening reception. We took a bus from our hotel to downtown Washington DC, where we went on an Odyssey boat cruise around the Potomac. Unfortunately, we weren't able to go as far as we wanted due to high tide (we wouldn't have been able to make it back under the bridge because the tide was so high), so we just floated around in a circle for a couple of hours. Here is a picture of the boat from their website. It was too dark to get good pictures, but it looked very cool at night with all the lights around. The inside of the boat had Christmas decorations and looked very festive.
On Thursday evening, my co-worker Stephanie Hamill and I took a cab to the White House to see the National Christmas Tree. The cab dropped us off a little ways from the Washington Monument and this picture was taken as we were walking towards it.
As we started walking toward the White House, we heard a lot of sirens and saw a lot of police activity in that direction and wondered what was going on. Little did we know that it was the night of the tree lighting ceremony and we missed seeing President Obama and his family lighting the tree by 20 minutes. Most of the people had gone by the time we got there, so that was one good thing about it. The national tree actually wasn't that impressive - it isn't that tall and was very fat in the middle.
It was cute that they had trains and villages all around the tree. I thought about my grandson, Sam, when I saw this and know he would have loved it!
Around the center area where the National Christmas Tree stood, was a small Christmas Tree decorated by somebody from each different state. Here is Arizona's:
The Christmas trees were behind the White House, so after we were done, we walked around to the front of the White House. It looked very beautiful and peaceful.
We walked down the street a bit and saw a lot of Occupy Wallstreet protesters at the 'W' Hotel, near the White House. The police were patrolling them very carefully, but they seemed pretty peaceful. I would hate it if I were the 'W' Hotel though - the poor guests who had to go in and out of the doors! We walked a little further down the street and found McCormick & Schmick's on 13th Street in Washington DC, so we stopped to eat dinner there. It was delicious and very expensive, but our company was paying for it!
We called the cab driver who took us downtown to see if he would pick us up and then we started walking back to where he dropped us off. We never did hear from him, so we took the Metro back to our hotel. Stephanie was afraid to ride the Metro, but she did it and I took this picture of her getting on the Metro to prove to her family that she had done it! Yay for Steph!
It was a great trip and I look forward to these Conferences every year - even though they are a ton of work!
