A hermit goes on vacation

I'm one of those rare souls who hates to go on vacation.  My theory is:  my clothes are here, my favorite foods are here, my bed is here, why in the world would I want to be someplace else?  Yep, I'm a hermit.  There are very few instances I can think of where it would be preferable to be someplace beside my own cozy little house.  A couple months ago, an instance came up.

A good friend invited me to go along with her to Washington DC to visit her daughter and son (and his family) who all live in the DC area.  I'm not too interested in monuments and memorials, but my dream has always been to go to the Smithsonian Museums.  She'd found some cheap flights, we had a free place to stay and, the topper, she wanted to spend all her time with her 6 month old grandson and her family are all busy people, this meant that I would be able to spend the day at the Smithsonian all by myself. The hermit in me did a little squee of excitement - I could go wherever I wanted to and take as much or as little time at each display as I desired with no one to feel responsible about.  So, heck yeah, I WAS GOING!

Our first full day was spent driving through the Shenandoahs.  Lots of trees, lots of mountains and valleys, yeah yeah, I can get nature at home, people, give me some good stuff!  The next day - jackpot!  A friend from the area offered to go with me to the city.  She taught me how to use the Metro, gave me a map of the city and spent the day with me at the American History Museum.  Since she'd seen it all before, she was fine just tagging along, letting me take my time and do my thing.  We had a great time at the display of First Lady inaugural ball gowns, critiquing everyone's taste in clothes.  Grace Coolidge is definitely the first lady with the coolest dresses. Of course, this may have something to do with her being First Lady during the 1920's, the greatest era of all time in my opinion, so there's a tad bit of favoritism going on.

The next day was my day on my own.  I went to art galleries (if you're ever in DC, the Renwick is a must-see, it's just covered in awesome sauce), visited the various war memorials and such, and generally just wandered the streets taking everything in.  This was definitely the highlight day of my vacation, especially since what happened next.  Did I mention that I started this vacation 2 weeks ago?

Yep, the hermit finally leaves the house to see the sights and gets hit with a hurricane.  What the heck is up with that?  Fortunately, we were in an area that was barely affected by the storm, but the wind and rain prevented me from going back out on the town to continue getting my Smithsonian fixes.  It also delayed our flight by a day.  I've already learned about myself that if I do leave home, four days away is about my max before I start missing the old homefront, so I already knew this week long vacation was going to stress me out, but when I was forced to stay an additional day, I was going bonkers.  I did everything but put on a cheesehead hat and dance the polka when we finally landed back in good ol' Wisconsin.  Granted, this vacation was not as stressful as the one where my husband caught some sickness and thought he was going to die.  We were in Grenada at the time - Grenada is a tiny little 3rd world island in the Carribean, in case you didn't know.  I told him that if he died on me in a foreign country, I would never speak to him again - I guess that scared him healthy, because we got out of there alive, which is always a good thing.  But, now that I've crossed "live through a hurricane" off my bucket list, I see no reason to ever do it again.