our american history tour

the first week in november, my mom, andrew and i flew out to baltimore to visit my sister meagan and her family. meagan's husband cody, is working out in baltimore so they will be living out east for a while. it was a great trip and it was exciting to be out east again. i love visiting the east because it's so different than out here. my only regret was that i was SUPER tired the whole time. because of that, i didn't take as many pics as i would have liked. but we still had a great time!

andrew, meagan, my mom and allie in front of a really pretty church in baltimore. i know i learned the name of it but i don't remember now. it was so beautiful though!

i wished i remembered the names of these places... i really liked baltimore! i wasn't sure what to expect but the parts we saw i really enjoyed. it was really beautiful there and the city has so much character. we went on a duck tour (a tour around the city and the harbour in an amphibious vehicle from WWII) and got to see a lot of the city. the suburb that meag & cody live in is georgeous with all the trees everywhere. it gets my stamp of approval! :)

i thought this was cute. i should have curled up in back with them!

so halfway through the trip we dubbed our little excursion our american history tour because of all the american history sites we were seeing. everything was so close, we were less than an hour from philadelphia and washington d.c. we spent the first two days in baltimore and while we were there we saw Fort McHenry (in case you don't remember, the events surrouding Fort McHenry and the war of 1812 is how we got our national anthem, The Star Spangled Banner written by Francis Scott Key).

we traveled north and visited Gettysburg but i didn't get any pics :( and then up to philadelphia and we saw some of the sites there.

this is the Liberty Bell with Liberty Hall in the background

i have a couple pics of anders doing the same thing!

we took a horse and carriage tour (i've always wanted to do that and i finally got to!) around philadelphia. it was a lot of fun and educational! :)

we stopped briefly back in baltimore to sleep and shower and then we headed down to washington d.c..

that's us with the washingtons...

in front of Mount Vernon, the home of George and Martha Washington.

the hardings in front of the Potomac River. this is the view from the back of Mount Vernon... i would have loved living there. it was so beautiful. the picture doesn't do it justice at all. we visited a lot of awesome sites and i really enjoyed them all but i think Mount Vernon was my favorite. it was the first time that i had been there and i really enjoyed it.

the next day was a little on the chilly side but we bundled everyone up and headed out to see an extremely abbreviated tour of washington d.c. we had a great day!

Arlington National Cemetary

in front of the metro tracks... we took the metro from the cemetary into d.c. i really enjoyed riding the metro. it was fast and fun!

meag and anders at the WWII memorial. anders was such a trooper!

cody & meag - thanks for letting us come see you! we had a great time! can i bring mason out soon?

joe & erin - it was GREAT to see you guys! it didn't occur to me until later but i wished we would have taken some pics. at least then we would have evidence of the two hours we were able to spend together! thanks for driving out to see us! it made my day! :)