We started the day by saying goodbye to our close friends and driving to Arlington Cemetery. In our minds, Americans should be required to visit this place as part of their education. It is so hard to walk through such a somber place without recognizing the great amount of respect the people of our armed forces deserve for protecting the freedom of Americans. It’s also difficult not to think about the reasons these people died in service of the United States of America. Arlington Cemetery is such a beautiful place that inherently gives respect to all people that have died in service, whether they are buried or memorialized there or not.

While all of these thoughts swirl throughout your mind, you also wonder if we are losing the very precious freedoms and ideals for which these public servants paid such a high price. As our country increasingly puts faith in government and less in God and as Congress’ average time of service in the armed forces decreases, we believe visits to Arlington Cemetery would serve as a reminder how fallible government is and cause people to redefine the phrase “public servant” in their minds. And honestly, visits to civil war and revolutionary war battlefields have a similar effect.

Ok. Here are some pictures of our time at Arlington:

View from below of Robert E. Lee’s house

View of Arlington and D.C. from Robert E. Lee’s House

Tomb of the Unknown Soldier

J and A in front of the cherry blossoms.

Once we walked throughout the cemetery, which turns out to be a lot of walking up and down lots of hills, we needed to get some lunch. We drove to D.C. and found a Baja Fresh on I Street and 20th street. Then we drove around the monuments and began our drive to our hotel in Rockville.

On our way to Rockville, we realized that we would be awfully close to Great Falls National Park. And we all know how much the JandA Experience loves national parks (well we might not know since we started blogging after our national park trips). Anyway, this place is cool! We walked throughout the river trails and were able to get some great views of the Potomac.

After spending a few hours at the park, we started our drive again to Rockville. We got to our hotel and this is when we found out about the explosions at the Boston Marathon. We are very saddened by these events and pray for the families affected. It is hard to describe our day in this blog, knowing that on the same day such a terrible event happened.

We unpacked and watched the news while trying to find a place to eat dinner. Luckily, our hotel is only 15 minutes away from a Founding Farmers.

This place is exactly the type of restaurant we enjoy. They only serve fresh quality food made on the premises. We started out by ordering the skillet honey-butter cornbread.

Justine ordered a lemonade (fresh-squeezed) and I ordered a Manhattan Soda (basically a homemade coffee soda).

For our meal, we each ordered the ribeye steak with carrots and mashed potatoes.

Well, that’s it for Monday. Thanks for reading!