16.75 miles...

...is the distance from our home to George Washington's home at Mount Vernon - according to mapquest. Also according to mapquest this drive should take 28 minutes - that is about what it took us when we drove there in the late morning. Today, I made the critical error of leaving said Mount Vernon at 3pm. Two plus hours later, we were home. Actually I stopped at a park near us to reward the children for their patience on our "drive". The commuting traffic was so slow and so motionless for most of the drive, I was at least able to redeem the time and read half of a chapter book to the children about a young Spanish boy who was Christopher Columbus' ship boy aboard the Santa Maria! I left at 3pm to give myself "plenty" of time to get us to Irish Dance practice by 4:15pm. Let's just say that after 5 miles and 50 minutes, I knew we wouldn't make it. I could read to the children because most of our time was spent stopped with a few non-reading bursts of a few feet at 1-3mph!

Highway 1 parallels I-95 and has several stop lights which doesn't help. By the time I had an opportunity to get on I-95 I'd been driving for over an hour and a half and just took Highway 1 home. Good thing - I heard on the radio later that accidents had clogged up I-95 south even worse than Highway 1!

The sad reality is that there were no accidents on Highway 1 today - this is the pace those who commute home from at least 3pm onwards go on a typical day. I just CAN'T imagine!!!

So, its very "cool" to live so close to Mount Vernon and just pop in occasionally for an outing to learn more about our First President since we have season passes. Choosing to leave at 3pm and negligently forget I live in the DC metro area? - NOT so "cool".

But, hey, we not only learned a lot about and were inspired by our First President, we also learned a lot about the voyage of Christopher Columbus :-) Did I mention I surprised the children with a drive through trip to Dunkin Donuts on the way to the park? Did I mention mine was glazed?

PS We've now found out Route 1 was backed up due to a wreck on I-95 which forced everyone on alternate routes. We were sad to hear about the wreck - it was a bad one, and makes our wait in traffic a very small inconvenence indeed.