Trip Day 4 & 5: Charlottesville, VA

We spent Sunday and Monday in Charlottesville where my sister Naomi and her husband Dave and their baby Polly live. Dave is finishing up his PhD. in neuroscience at UVA. I had been to Charlottesville once before, to take engagement pictures of her and Dave. Charlottesville is a very nice city in the midst of the Virginia mountains. It is an old city (at least by American standards), and UVA in particular has a very historic feel to it.
Dave had left early Sunday morning, so we met Naomi at her church building for Sunday services. It was her very first Mother's Day as a mother and she also was one of the Sacrament Meeting speakers as well as a choir member, so Ben was put on baby-duty while Naomi was up on the stand. I think I talked about her talk before, but it really was excellent, and Polly was very good. Ben stood up with her for a couple of minutes by the door, just bouncing her, and she was quiet and content and graced us all with several adorable baby smiles. Her ward is very nice and everyone loves Naomi, and gasped at how much we look alike, which was no surprise at all.
After church, Naomi fed us spaghetti and I took some pictures of her and Polly. It was a peaceful Sabbath and a nice break from the busy days of traveling.
Monday we had planned to go see a few Charlottesville sites including Monticello, but we got a little (or should I say a lot) side tracked by laundry that needed doing, and the search for a nice but not too expensive and not too far away hotel in D.C. So we mostly just hung out at Naomi's.
In the afternoon we drove out to a park near the base of the hill where Monticello is built and ate a late picnic lunch and went on a beautiful walk up the hill.


Being a western girl, and currently a Texan, I am just not used to the lush greenness of the east coast. The trees were HUGE, towering over us, filtering the sunlight into a soft, watery green that washed over everything. Ben pushed me in the wheelchair and the boys ran on ahead for the 1.5 miles or so up the trail. A good deal of the trail is actually a wooden boardwalk built into the mountainside. I felt like my eyes just weren't big enough to take it all in, it was so beautiful!
The boys had been looking forward to seeing Monticello, so when we got up to the gates, we were dismayed to find that the guard had *just* closed them for the day. We didn't want to do the expensive tour of Monticello (the boys just wouldn't care enough to make it be worth it), which was why we hadn't driven up to the Monticello parking lot where a shuttle comes to drive visitors up to the top of the hill. If we had, we would have been able to get up and see the house and the grounds before it closed. Naomi did her very best to sweet-talk the guard into letting us go up, just to see the house, but he was not swayed. We were very disappointed.
(photo courtesy of Google images, it's not mine)
Anyway, many tears were shed (I was actually surprised and a little touched by how much the boys wanted to see Monticello. I guess the notion of seeing the building that's on the nickel was very intriguing to them), and many complaints issued forth as we turned around and headed back down the hill.
But by the time we got back down to the bottom, I think everyone was ok. I wasn't too worried as I knew we'd have our fill of historic buildings during our time in D.C.
We said goodbye to Naomi and continued on to drive around Charlottesville a little more before heading back on the road for Washington D.C.
We drove through a pounding rainstorm (this is why the east coast is so green!), stopped for shakes at McDonalds, and pushed through to Fairfax, VA where we found our hotel room at the Hyatt.
Ben got a great deal on our room, and it was very nice. But I realized that the more expensive the hotel, the less free stuff you get. At the Days Inn, we got free WiFi and free continental breakfast. At the Hyatt? Wifi for $14/day and certainly no free breakfast. They did have water bottles in the room that we could have chosen to drink f0r a measly $4 each. Ha, ha, ha. But it did have an indoor pool and hot tub, and it was very comfortable and had 2 queen beds AND a pull-out couch. (We'd mostly been sharing 2 double beds between the 5 of us which gets very cosy very fast).



(Here they are in our room at the Hyatt. See? The boys are still little enough that they sleep like puppies, sprawled out over anyone and anything. It's really cute, but not so nice to sleep next to!)

We slept pretty well except for a very bizarre incident in which a bunch of kids came pounding down the hallway at about 2:00 AM. A few of them were laughing and talking out loud (I think they were Japanese), but then one of them started screaming and crying. It was very disturbing, she (or he) was obviously extremely upset, possibly hurt. We were on the verge of getting up to see what was going on when the voices receded down the hallway. Very odd. I wanted to ask the concierge the next morning to find out what exactly had happened.