We had been living in the US for about a year and experienced our first presidential election. The children had been studying and discussing it in school so it felt like a good time to see the White House.
We stayed in a hotel central to the museums & memorials so we could just walk around the city. It was August but luckily not too hot, mostly blue skies and a breeze.
There are a lot of museum options so we needed to make our selection, most of them free and one paying. We chose Newseum, Air and Space Museum, Museum of American Art (because it had a retro video games exhibit at the time) and the Natural History Museum. In such a city there is always more to see and do but city breaks tend to involve a lot of walking and information overload so our 3 days was just right.
We then took our hire car and headed to Williamsburg, 2 1/2 hours south. For a change of pace, we stayed at the Historic Powhatan Resort with nice grounds, pools, mini golf, racketball and children’s activities on site.
Then it was back to sightseeing and history at Colonial Williamsburg. We opted for the multi-day ticket so we could take our time since it is a large site and there is a lot to see. We didn’t dress up ourselves but saw plenty of visitors in costumes! There are houses and workshops that you can just wander around and the guides in character will talk to you about the history and the role they have – cooper, blacksmith, baker etc whilst other things, such as the oxen carriage ride, had to be booked. The children were shown how to fire a musket, we mixed the clay at the brickworks and then laid bricks, watched a puppet show and had lunch and played corn hole at one of the taverns.
We took 2 days to explore Colonial Williamsburg with a day at Busch Gardens in between, for something a little different! The final day we drove back to Washington and in the time remaining before our late afternoon flight we made a quick visit to Arlington National Cemetery.
