January 14, 2016 In Road Trip, Travelogues

Week 13.5: Walking in the Savannah

After a couple of days in Charleston, we continued our trek down south to Savannah, which is very close by.  We only spent 1 day walking around Savannah, but it was a city we’re definitely eager to visit again.  We’ve traveled all over the United States and to more than a dozen different countries between us, and Savannah is in the top 5 of prettiest cities we’ve ever seen.  (Prague and Singapore are the current leaders.)  If Charleston felt like a racetrack at times, Savannah is the mansion earned with the winnings.

Savannah claims the distinction of being the first planned city in the United States, and we wish more cities had copied its design.  The downtown grid features 22 civic squares, gorgeous spaces which are essentially manicured, shaded public parks.  The buildings are wonderful too, and everywhere you look, you can find expensive antebellum mansions with worked iron gates and fences.  (Of course, as civic plaques occasionally acknowledge, the city’s considerable pre-Civil War wealth was built on the backs of slaves.)

One local legend is that General Sherman of the Union army, who famously torched Atlanta and most of the rest of the South as part of his “March to the Sea,” refused to do the same to Savannah because he considered the city too beautiful to burn.  Probably false, but hey, if the “History” Channel can air a documentary claiming that aliens killed off the dinosaurs, we can choose to believe this one!  At least we have photographic proof that Savannah is, in fact, pretty:

We didn’t have much time in Savannah, but we made a few stops worth noting.  Namely, the great BBQ lunch we had in a converted travel trailer:

And our visit to Fort Pulaski, a former fort turned national monument with a rather amusing history.  Built in the 1830s and 1840s, the fort protects the entrance to Savannah from the sea, and it was designed to be impregnable to attack.  It sported an impressively thick wall, a moat, and close to 150 heavy cannons.  The fort was considered invincible once finished.

Of course, it is a historical truism that any story about something “invincible” always ends badly for that thing.  (See, e.g., The Titanic.)  In the case of Fort Pulaski, the fort was seized by Confederate militiamen prior to the beginning of the Civil War, but it wasn’t held long.  The Union army landed on a nearby island about a mile away – slightly longer than the range of the cannons inside the fort – and quickly installed a battery of newer, bigger guns there.

These new guns happened to have a much longer range than those installed in the fort, and like a man with a sword fighting a man with a spork, it was pretty one-sided.  After less than 36 hours of continuous barrage, the Union cannon were close to breaching the powder room and blowing everything to pieces, and the “invincible” fort surrendered.

It was over in less time than it takes to binge-watch every episode of Game of Thrones; unlike Game of Thrones, though, most of the people involved survived.

LAST BITS

What’s next:  We are still in Phoenix, making baby steps towards planning the rest of our trip.  We’re planning to head next to Quartzsite, Arizona, which is apparently some sort of crazy winter RV meetup location with pop-up vendors.  We’re envisioning a cross between a Moroccan bazaar and Iowa.

Obligatory social media self-promotion:  If you want to follow along and you haven’t yet, please Like us on Facebook and/or follow us on Twitter (@NothingMundane) and/or Instagram (NothingMundane) to make sure you get all the updates.  You are statistically unlikely to regret it.

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Next Post: Week 14: Flo-Ride-Ah

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January 12, 2016 In Road Trip, Travelogues

Week 13: Charleston Style

Happy New Year from Nothing Mundane!  We’re back with another blog post, covering our visit to the friendly Southern city of Charleston, South Carolina.  We were planning to write about Savannah, Georgia, as well, but the post was getting way too long, so we’re going to publish that one separately.  Of course, we’re way behind as usual, this time around three and a half months; we were there in late September.  We’ve thought about jumping to the present time, but for now we’ve decided to keep writing about the past.  For more recent adventures, please check our Facebook and Instagram feeds.

In case you are curious, we figure that if we don’t write about our past travels, we’ll probably forget about them, and that would be a real bummer.  In some ways, then, this is all just a love letter to our future selves.  Hope everything is going well, Future Jake and Heather!  Sorry about all those life decisions we’ve been making.

Drinking In The Town

Charleston is a great Southern city with a lot of history.  The city is a lot of fun, and we had a good time walking around downtown and taking photos.  The water is lovely, as are many of the buildings, although quite a bit of the area looks like it could use a new paint job.  We had some incredible food in Charleston, and even went on a mini-pub crawl for Heather’s birthday.



Birthday cupcakes for Heather!

A photo posted by Jake and Heather (@nothingmundane) on

We took a million pictures because it was just so pretty. So many palm trees, bright colors, and beautiful buildings.

One highlight of our visit was over-stuffing ourselves with some traditional Shrimp & Grits and a “Charleston Nasty Biscuit” from the iconic Hominy Grill. It was probably the best fried chicken either of us has ever had.  We then tried to work off some of those calories by walking around the city, including through the beautiful campus of the College of Charleston.

We are total suckers for Spanish moss.

We were hoping to get a beach day during our visit, but unfortunately the weather did not cooperate. So, during our final, overcast day, we decided to check out Fort Moultrie on Sullivan’s Island. We joined a tour group with some children, but decided that was way more learning than we wanted, so we ditched the tour group and just wandered around on our own.  A highlight was the long tunnels underneath the fort, where other visitors were taking advantage of the echoing and trying to imitate a wolf. We give them an A+, very realistic howling!  (Howling… howling… howling…)

Race Problems

While we had a wonderful time in Charleston, we must also mention that the drivers in Charleston are kind of insane.  Now, we grew up in the Northeast and lived for years in New York City, so it takes a lot to raise our eyebrows when it comes to driving.  The NYC metropolitan area, along with Boston, features some truly terrible, selfish, impatient, and unnecessarily aggressive drivers, but we haven’t see much of that type elsewhere in the country… except in Charleston.  Everybody drove fast, and simple things like making a left turn always seemed to require some pedal-to-the-floor madness.  Driving the RV through Charleston felt like pushing a car in neutral across an active NASCAR track.

But that’s all in the rearview mirror, and we managed to make it out of Charleston with nothing more than a couple of spilled coffees.  Plus, we coined a term we’ve been using ever since:  the “Charleston style” turn, for when roadways leave no choice except to gun the engine, close your eyes, and merge into a stream of cars that doesn’t seem terribly interesting in avoiding you.

via GIPHY

No Place Like Home

We did have one other interesting experience while in Charleston.  On our final night there, at about 1 a.m. in the middle of a thunderstorm, a tornado touched down about 5 miles from our RV.  We know this because we were awakened in the middle of the night by screeching alarms from our phones, which warned of an imminent tornado threat in our area and advised we seek shelter.  Our motorhome is, of course, not terribly tornado-resistant – maybe we should start attaching it to the ground using tent stakes – so we headed to the campground bathhouse, which didn’t seem all that strong but was at least made of concrete.

Now, there were close to 100 RVs at this campground, and we doubt any of them would hold up against the Big Bad Wolf’s huffing and puffing.  So we were more than a little surprised to only find about 4 other people, total, seeking shelter.  We guess everyone else decided it would be better to go down with the ship?  Or perhaps they were just hoping to be sent to Oz, where maybe they can find a brain.

via GIPHY

LAST BITS

What’s next:  We just got back to our RV in Phoenix, Arizona, after driving approximately 6,700 miles for the holidays.  (You read that right.)  We’re taking it easy for a few days.

Obligatory social media self-promotion:  If you want to follow along and you haven’t yet, please Like us on Facebook and/or follow us on Twitter (@NothingMundane) and/or Instagram (NothingMundane) to make sure you get all the updates.  All the cool kids are doing it.

Shamefully missed a prior post?  We made a list of the most recent ones, just for you.

Next Post: Week 13.5: Walking in the Savannah

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December 15, 2015 In Road Trip, Travelogues

Week 12.5: Drinking & Driving in Charlotte & Asheville… Respectively.

Welcome back friends!  If you didn’t see it, we just posted a… post… about our RV renovations, where you can get a glimpse of our high-ambition, low-skill interior remodeling. The renovation was certainly a learning experience, and as the days go by, and our memories fade, it’s something that we might take up again in the new year. The bedroom won’t renovate itself!  [Ed. note:  Heather added those last two sentences unilaterally.  They do not represent the opinions of all Nothing Mundane affiliates.]

Returning to our road trip, we traveled from Richmond, Virginia to North Carolina, “Ol’ Northy,” and the metropolitan regions of Charlotte and Asheville.  Our mission:  have fun and mooch off our friends.

Charlotte

We’ve been to a lot of places on this road trip, and sometimes it can be difficult to find a good place to eat or fun things to do.  Well, we stayed in Charlotte with our friends the Casses, and one of the great things about visiting people is that they already know the cool things to do.  For example, we had dinner at a pretty sweet bar and grill called Lebowski’s, where the food was good and the excuse to run a picture of Jake’s “The Dude” Halloween costume was made plausible.

A surprising favorite stop in Charlotte was the Lost Duffer mini-golf course, which we tried on a whim.  The first half was hilariously easy, each cup placed at the bottom of a hole resembling a giant funnel, but hey – you don’t play mini-golf to feel humiliated.  The second half of the course then went underground, into an “abandoned mine” that was definitely not “the basement of the building.”  It was dark enough that we sometimes had to play by phone flashlight, and the holes were humiliatingly challenging, but hey – you don’t play mini-golf to feel successful.

The whole experience was charmingly insane, and we would definitely go back.

We also toured the hip areas of Charlotte, stopping in for some iced coffee (served in a mason jar) which we foolishly ordered “to stay.”  Have you ever just sat around in a stylish coffee shop, drinking delicious coffee out of a mason jar, with nothing to do but talk to your good friends you haven’t seen in ages?  So boring.  We quickly pivoted to a game of 2-player reactor.

Let’s face it, human interaction is overrated, and if we’re being honest, we drank and/or gamed our way across the city.  We had great German beers at a local beer hall, combined with the first of many games of Carcassonne (a Nothing Mundane favorite and a great addition to any board game collection).  One highlight of this beer hall:  there was a corporate event being held there, and although almost everyone was dressed normally, one guy showed up in full German mountain-man regalia.

Dress for the job you want, not the job you have!

One thing we’ve found on this trip is that, thanks to the craft brewing revolution, you can get fantastic beer anywhere these days.  (The tiny grocery store in Marfa, Texas – population 2,000 – had an entire refrigerator devoted to microbrews.)  And in a big city like Charlotte, the options are endless – we visited several great breweries just within a few blocks of each other.  Not a bad time to be alive!

Also, there were donuts.

Mmm, doughnuts #donuts

A photo posted by Jake and Heather (@nothingmundane) on

We made one final sightseeing stop in Charlotte, heading to the Wing Haven Garden and Bird Sanctuary to make some avian friends.  The founders of Wing Haven were a husband and wife who gardened extensively, nursed baby birds back to health, and did many other do-gooder type things. This resulted in a bird sanctuary that was overflowing with beautiful birds, right in the middle of the city.

At least, that was the impression given by the mandatory 15 minute introductory video, which looked suspiciously like it was shot in the 1970s.

Here in the 2010s, the founders passed away many, many years ago, and in the course of a half-hour walk around the property, we did not see a single bird.  We didn’t see any wildlife at all, actually, not even a squirrel.  We can’t complain too much, since the garden was pretty, and admission was free.  But would it be too much to ask for them to tie a bird to a tree or something, just to keep up appearances?

Is that a bird on the ground? Oh… no, just a rock.

Asheville

We hung out with the Casses for a few days, but before we left North Carolina for good, we took a day trip west to visit Asheville.  Asheville is a quirky, fun mountain town with fantastic 1920’s style art deco architecture, thanks to a decades-long economic depression that prevented any new buildings from being constructed.  Nothing preserves like bankruptcy!

Those days are long gone, and Asheville today is pretty trendy.  The brunch spots were jammed, but we persevered, and ended up having the best fried chicken biscuit of our lives at Southern Kitchen.  There were loads of cool shops, too – we wandered into a quirky gift store that had a display on RV living.  (We are trendy by association!)  It’s also extremely liberal, and it strongly reminded us of Ithaca, New York, where we lived for three years – particularly when we wandered by a streetside hippie peace festival, which aimed to stem the power of corporations via tambourine.

However, there’s certainly still a bit of Appalachia present.  Outside of one restaurant, we saw a guy in a bluegrass band playing an actual washboard, which is all it takes to make our day.

Blue Ridge Parkway

Our final adventure in North Carolina was on the way back from Asheville, as we drove along the Blue Ridge Parkway.  We only saw about 35 miles of the Parkway’s 470 mile length, but what we saw was insanely beautiful.  The scenery is gorgeous, with pristine rivers, lakes, and forests in front of endless mountains ridges.

We can’t possibly recommend this one enough, with one caveat:  the Asheville-to-Charlotte leg doesn’t have a clearly defined end point, so be careful where you exit.  We left the Parkway at a random point, and found ourselves more or less on top of a mountain in the deep wilderness, driving down the most switchback-y road in the history of switchbacks.  It was cool!  But it also took us an hour to go about 3 miles.

Photographing the photographer. #blueridge #blueridgeparkway #asheville #northcarolina

A photo posted by Jake and Heather (@nothingmundane) on

Dammit, Joseph!

LAST BITS

What’s next:  Currently, we are in Phoenix, Arizona, “Ol’ Phoenie,” which is surprisingly pretty but disappointingly cold.  Tomorrow, we’re ditching the RV for a month and beginning a 5-day, several-thousand-mile drive back to the Northeast for the holidays.  We’re planning to stop in El Paso, Roswell, Oklahoma City, Memphis, Nashville, and who knows where else.  Wish us luck!

Obligatory social media self-promotion:  If you want to follow along and you haven’t yet, please Like us on Facebook and/or follow us on Twitter (@NothingMundane) and/or Instagram (NothingMundane) to make sure you get all the updates.  All the cool kids are doing it.

Shamefully missed a prior post?  We made a list of the most recent ones, just for you.

Next Post: Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays!

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December 12, 2015 In Road Trip

Intermission: Renovation

We’re taking a break from our irregularly scheduled programming for some exciting news:  we renovated our RV!  Now, this may not be a surprise, since we’ve posted a few pictures on Facebook and Instagram, but we haven’t posted the full set anywhere yet.

The majority of the work was done over the course of about 3 weeks in El Paso, Texas, while staying with Jake’s mom.  We installed everything ourselves.  There will be some more details below, but a short list of the renovations includes:

We also added a throw rug and a new, custom artwork by Heather.  We may end up making some additional renovations, but we’re waiting until after the new year – 957 Home Depot trips in 21 days was enough for now.

Enjoy!

Before & After

Here’s a few pictures showing our RV before and after the renovation.  Our RV is from 2002, and although it was in good shape when we bought it, much of the interior looked very outdated.  Even if it were new, RV furniture and decor tends to look pretty crummy.  While the floor and countertops took a lot of work, many of these fixes were simple and relatively inexpensive.

As you can see in the picture above, we took up the ugly old green carpet and replaced it with vinyl “wood” flooring, along with a colorful and inexpensive rug.  Heather sewed new slipcovers out of fabric for the couch and the dinette cushions, and she also made some artwork to replace the mirror in the upper left of the “before” picture.  She also covered the window valances with new fabric. Oh, and we replaced the broken cupholder!

Another shot of the dinette renovation.  You can see Jake’s gigantic computer in the first picture, which he moved into a slightly less gigantic case. We also have plans to upgrade the table, and maybe replace the carpeting under the table with vinyl planks too.

The kitchen is where we did most of the work, and we’re really happy with how it turned out.  We installed a new laminate countertop, which basically glues onto the existing countertop, as well as a new kitchen faucet.  Laminate sheets are the worst thing ever to work with (all they want to do is chip and slice your hands), but we showed it who was boss. We also added a backsplash, which is really just a bunch of stick-on panels (shh, don’t tell anyone), and changed out the gold hardware with oil-rubbed bronze handles with a more modern profile.   Our favorite part is the new faucet – the old one wasn’t even tall enough for our pots to fit underneath!

A close up of the new countertop, faucet, and backsplash.  The countertop was purchased from Lowe’s, but we got the faucet and backsplash online.

Our tiny bathroom definitely looks a lot better now.  We removed the old sink, which was really small and cheap, and put in a new, copper sink we purchased online.  We also installed a “waterfall”-type faucet and a new countertop.  Because of time limitations, we didn’t extend the new flooring up and around the toilet, but we have some extra planks so we may do that in the future.

Close up of the new sink and faucet.  Amazon links for the interested:  sink, faucet, drain.

An overall shot.  We think it turned out great!  Note, we didn’t have a good overall “before” picture so we used a stock photo from the manual, but it’s extremely close to what it looked like.

DIY Fun

We haven’t tallied up the total cost of all the renovations, but it was probably substantially less than $1,000.  In part, this is because we did the work ourselves – we ripped up carpet, cut and laid flooring, glued countertops, and Heather even hand-sewed the slipcovers.  (It helps that we could only use the lightest, and therefore cheapest, materials.)  It was a ton of work, but we definitely learned a lot.

Here’s a gallery of in-progress pictures for anyone interested.  We included captions, and you can see the whole story by clicking on the first one and using the arrows to move to the next picture in turn.  Mobile users should also be able to swipe to get to the next picture. (Unfortunately, it looks kind of crummy on mobile – that’s something we need to figure out. For now, we recommend looking at it on something with a bigger screen.  We also uploaded the album to Imgur which may look better.)

LAST BITS

What’s next:  Currently, we are in Phoenix, Arizona, enjoying unseasonably warm weather and unreasonably pretty sunsets.  Soon, we’re headed back to the Northeast for the holidays.

Obligatory social media self-promotion:  If you want to follow along and you haven’t yet, please Like us on Facebook and/or follow us on Twitter (@NothingMundane) and/or Instagram (NothingMundane) to make sure you get all the updates.  Every update is certified GMO-free!

Shamefully missed a prior post?  We made a list of the most recent ones, just for you.

Next Post: Week 12.5: Drinking & Driving in Charlotte & Asheville… Respectively.

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December 2, 2015 In Road Trip, Travelogues

Week 12: Footloose in Richmond

Heading south from Washington, D.C., we headed towards Richmond, Virginia, the third stop on our “Race to San Antonio.”  We were only in town for two days, which was a shame, because (1) Richmond was pretty cool, and (2) our RV park was right next to a well-regarded brewery (!) and we never got a chance to check it out.

But that’s OK, since it turns out Richmond has a lot of breweries.  In fact, we met Heather’s friend Tex at a brewery on our first night in Richmond.  The beer was tasty, and the men’s room art was sublime.

Not a bad start to our 36 hours in #richmond.

A photo posted by Jake and Heather (@nothingmundane) on

Found in the men’s room of a Richmond brewery. A photo posted by Jake and Heather (@nothingmundane) on

Southern Fury

We started our full day in Richmond with Monument Avenue. It’s a wide, tree-filled boulevard featuring statues of Civil War Confederate bigwigs, along with, for some reason, Arthur Ashe.  If you don’t know who that is (we didn’t), he was a Richmond native and the first black man to win the singles in Wimbledon and the US Open.  (He also left Richmond because it was horribly segregated.)  His statue was added in 1996, long after the others, and was quite a controversy at the time.

Today, in your humble correspondents’ opinion, the statue is still controversial, but only because it appears to depict Mr. Ashe beating children with a tennis racket and/or throwing a Bible at them.  He may also be defending himself from zombie children; it’s unclear.  Either way, we can’t support this statue:  a tennis racket is a terrible choice of weapon.

We followed Monument Avenue, and eventually ended up downtown with plans to explore the state capitol building, John Marshall’s house, and some other historical stuff.  Unfortunately, approximately 8 seconds into viewing the (very pretty) capitol, Heather’s flip-flop strap broke in an un-fixable and un-walkable manner.  She ended up walking the several blocks back to where we parked our car barefoot, and we came to appreciate that Richmond is very clean.

Nice place for a barefoot walk…

Heather was too embarrassed to go into a real shoe store, and she didn’t want to drive all the way back to the RV Park to get another pair of shoes, so we drove to a Target in the suburbs.  She ended up getting a pair of ankle boots to replace her flip-flops, because style, and nobody at Target said anything about the fact that Heather’s flip-flop was tied onto her foot with a hair band.

We celebrated the new arrangement with some monstrously large sandwiches from the Black Sheep.  The sandwiches are called “battleships,” and the menu section for the battleships is titled “The War of Northern Ingestion.” We got two half-size portions of the SS Sultana and the USS Roanoke, which proceeded to defeat us deliciously in gastric combat.

Southern Hospitality

After slipping into and emerging from a light food coma, we headed to Maymont Mansion, a beautiful plantation-type house constructed in the early 1900s.  Maymont has been preserved as a public park, and the furnishings inside were in remarkably good shape.  Also in remarkably good shape was our tour guide through the mansion, Bill, who is 97 years old and still going strong.  Although he couldn’t really hear us, he still has a tour guide’s booming voice, and he climbs stairs like a man of no more than 67 years, tops.  Bill was alive when the mansion’s owner passed away in 1925!  Crazy.

We had to point out one highlight from the below photo of the lady’s bedroom.  The swan bed is cool, but check out the vanity and chair to its left.  They are made from the tusks of Narwhals!  Narwhals are basically the unicorns of the sea, and this furniture is made from their horns. Woah.

After leaving the mansion we strolled around the English and Japanese gardens, which were beautiful and huge. Heather’s choice of high-heeled ankle boots were not exactly perfect for the cobblestone and grass walkways, but she was a trooper, and only walked barefoot through the gardens for a little bit.

This blog post should probably be subtitled, “Heather walks around Richmond barefoot.”

The English Garden was lovely, but the Japanese Garden was even prettier.  There were a lot of fun features, including stepping stones in the giant koi pond.

A study in contrasts: Jake vs. Heather in the Japanese Garden.

Last night

We met up with Tex again, who treated us to a fantastic dinner at Millie’s Diner.  The staff was friendly, the food was great, and the walls are adorned with creepy, steam-punk babies from a local artist.  All you can ask for in a meal, really.

LAST BITS

What’s next:  Currently, we are in Albuquerque, New Mexico, where it is freaking freezing.  We’re going to head west to the Four Corners and the Grand Canyon as soon as we can defrost our RV.

Obligatory social media self-promotion:  If you want to follow along and you haven’t yet, please Like us on Facebook and/or follow us on Twitter (@NothingMundane) and/or Instagram (NothingMundane) to make sure you get all the updates.  It’s the best way to ensure your creepy baby doll art fix.

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Next Post: Intermission: Renovation

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November 26, 2015 In Road Trip, Travelogues

Week 11.5: The Greenbelt in the Beltway

Hi friends,

We’re a bit further behind than usual after spending the last 3 weeks in El Paso making some major renovations to our RV:  we replaced the floor, the countertops, faucets, a sink, a backsplash, and more.  Not to toot our own horns, but it looks pretty great!  We’ll post some pictures soon.

In the meantime, let’s reminisce about that time we went to Washington, D.C.  Cue obligatory White House selfie.

Capitol Camping

After leaving Pennsylvania behind, we headed south towards Washington, D.C., with some trepidation.  We’ve had bad experiences on the Beltway before, but this trip was mercifully smooth.  We headed to a national park right inside the Beltway called Greenbelt Park.  Greenbelt Park is spacious, cheap ($16 a night),  wooded, and totally empty – apparently because nobody knows about it.  From their website’s FAQs:

Why haven’t I heard about Greenbelt Park or the Greenbelt Park campground ? Since we are a federal government agency, we cannot spend taxpayer dollars on advertisements. We rely on word of mouth, Internet, and campground directories. We are a hidden jewel of the National Park Service.

They claim to have never been totally full, and when we were there on a warm weekend in September, we were nearly alone.  We saw more deer than people.  Definitely unusual for a campground near a major city, so if you’re in the area, you might want to check it out.

Though, you might want to avoid the bathrooms.

They weren’t moving.  Just staring.

Incidentally, the campground is extremely close to an Ikea.  We went over and strolled through, to dream about throwing away all our crappy RV furniture and replacing it with real furniture.  Or semi-real; it is Ikea, after all.  But it turned out there was nothing there we really wanted (or could fit) except Swedish meatballs and a 99¢ toilet brush.

Well, we got the meatballs, but the line to buy the toilet brush was about a half hour too long.  So, we gave up and, seeing nowhere else to return it, hid it in a potted plant.  Sorry, Ikea!

Social Medium

Most of our time in D.C. was spent visiting friends, and we won’t bore you all with the details of people you may not know, but we will say thanks for a great time to Nila & Patrick, LD, Rachel, Ashi, Alex, and the other folks we met up with.  We had delicious Sri Lankan food, delicious beers, and even an accidental front-row seat at a bar for the Pacquiao-Mayweather fight.

We did want to give a special shout-out to our friend and unpaid social media coach Kaoru, who allowed us to crash at her place and taught us how to use Twitter for personal benefit (our favorite kind of benefit!).  Also, how to use it at all.

Kaoru was once the “Bravoholic,” which is like being an addict for social media about terrible reality shows, and now she is our “social medium,” a new term we just invented for probably the four millionth time.  Among her other duties, she politely yells at us when we fail to post things correctly, which is frequent.  She also helped us get free cupcakes, using the power of social media.  Oh, and!  She taught us what all the buttons do in the Twitter app, which sadly is not a joke.

We wanted to say thanks for the help, so please feel free to visit her blog or twitter or instagram or… smoke signal region?  Whatever the kids are into now.  Everyone else, try to think about you how you can earn your own paragraph.

Nothing Mundane growing its social media presence (via GIPHY)

Strolling The Mall

We have both been to D.C. several times, but we decided to walk around and see all the tourist-y stuff again anyway.  We took the Metro into downtown and although we walked about 8 miles, according to our pedometer, it felt like we barely scratched the surface.  We saw the sculpture gallery, Smithsonian Museum of Natural History, White House, Washington Monument, Lincoln Memorial, WWII & Korean War  Memorials, the MLK Memorial (surprisingly weird), and many more miscellaneous fancy buildings.  We have photos of some of our favorites below.

Sculpture Garden

National Museum of Natural History

Just like A Night at the Museum, except not at night, and without Ben Stiller or Owen Wilson.  And nothing came alive.  Otherwise, exactly the same.

We really enjoyed the gem and mineral collection at the museum. Our take aways:  (1) the Hope Diamond isn’t all that big, and (2) minerals grow in crazy, cool ways – they can look furry, defy gravity, glow in the dark, and a million other naturally occurring, wholly unnatural things.

Monuments & Stately Buildings

Washington, especially the Mall, is just packed full of monuments and memorials. We tried to look up how many official monuments there are in DC, for a “fun” trivia fact, but our google-fu failed us.  So we are going to say there are more than… five! Can you believe it??

Our favorite part?  The below sign on the new Trump Hotel, very close to the White House.  It reads “Coming 2016, Trump.”  Amusing, but also, please God no.

LAST BITS

What’s next:  Currently, we are back in El Paso for a home-cooked Thanksgiving.  We’re headed back soon to Truth or Consequences, New Mexico, where the sunsets are beautiful and the medicinal hot springs can out-cure any brand of snake oil.

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Shamefully missed a prior post?  We made a list of the most recent ones, just for you.

Next Post: Week 12: Footloose in Richmond

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