The Trip That Wasn't

In my previous post, I shared our upcoming trip to Washington DC. It's one of our favorite cities to visit, largely because it's such a beautiful place to walk around and just look at cool stuff! Dan and I are both history nuts, so looking at old stuff really gets us going. 

However, we woke up on Monday to snow. Like, a lot of it. And from all the weather information we could find, it was doing the same thing in DC. Ick.

We dallied around--we wanted to leave late on purpose, to miss traffic. It meant we'd have less time in the city, but this trip was more about the "because we can" than because we had some crazy agenda. We tossed our stuff in the car, left a note for Sister (who was house-/dog-sitting for us) and headed out. Less than an hour into our journey, we hit a solid block of traffic. 

Seriously, we spent about 30 minutes going less than a mile down the turnpike. We hadn't even made it to I95 yet. 

We listened to the traffic report, considered our options, and decided to spend the day in Philly instead! 

I called the hotel and cancelled our reservations. Thankfully, because we were paying for it with rewards points, we didn't lose any money and our certificate is still valid for another hotel, another time. 

Here's a few snapshots of what we did in Philly...

First stop, Museum of Natural Sciences. I was super psyched to take these pictures, because my class just finished studying dinosaurs and now I can give them some real-life scale! 

Dan was a good sport.  

Dino femurs. 

Sorry for my weird-looking hand, but this is the size of a T-rex tooth. 

This made us laugh--scientists constructed this image and all kinds of theories about this dino just from the bones pictured above. 

Their little write-up about it. Ridiculous. 

After the dinosaurs, we looked at some information about diatoms (that we're pretty sure our friend Jonathan helped to study and catalogue) and some dioramas of animals from various parts of the world, we got to the butterfly exhibit. I think this was Dan's favorite part, he was pretty into it. 

Aren't they pretty? 

Feeding on rotten bananas. I got a pretty good shot of one butterfly with his proboscis out, pretty excited to show that to my students too! 

This dude's a moth. Moths rest with their wings open, they're nocturnal, and their antennae are furry instead of smooth (my dad actually taught me that forever ago, but it stuck and it's still correct!).

I forget the name of this butterfly, but that's some impressive camouflage. 

Next stop, (late) lunch. Dan found this awesome place just a few blocks away called Famous 4th Street Delicatessen. Holy moly, it was fabulous. 

Pickles! 

And the best part...hot pastrami on rye with cole slaw and Russian dressing! This gal was in heaven.

After lunch we decided to head home. I took a little nap (yay spring break!) and then we ran some errands together, including grabbing Jurassic Park from the library. So fun! 

Overall it was such a great day. We were relaxed and really thankful we made the decision we did--it was just what we needed!