Cherry Blossoms and Twin Time!!!

My Favorite Shot of the Blossoms and the Washington Monument

 

 

Twin!!!

So this past weekend I got to have a lot of special time with one of my favorite people, my best friend, Meg, ie my twin! She came down to Baltimore on Thursday and on Friday we headed to D.C. to see the Cherry Blossom Festival and run in the Cherry Blossom 10 miler race on Sunday! Thanks to Priceline we stayed at a pretty nice hotel for not too much money which made all our travels within the city much easier. Friday night I had rehearsal in D.C. so our real adventures started on Saturday.

Saturday morning we did our packet pick up for the race just in time because as we were leaving the National Building Museum around 10:30am the line was beginning to wrap around the building (mind you we waited in almost no line!).

Next we headed back to the hotel to drop off our stuff and head down to the mall area. We intitaially planned to see the Cherry Blossoms first then hit a few Smithsonians however Mother Nature had other plans.... As soon as we got off the Metro we got caught in a downpour which caused us to switch up our original order so we started with the Museum of American History. We saw all the highlights, the Star Spangled Banner, First Wives Dress Collection, Pop Culture and the Instruments. At that point with the sun shining brightly we decided it was a great time to hit the festival....wrong again! We took about 4 pictures before we got trapped in a hail storm. Luckily they had tents set up for the race the next day so we ducked into one of those to wait out the storm. Finally after that storm passed we got to see the trees and trust me it was worth the wait. I put up a few of my favorites from that afternoon. We really could have spent all day looking at the trees but as it was cold, wet and windy we decided to head to the Natural History Museum because what is a girl's trip without a visit to the Hope Diamond! After checking out the gem collection and the orchid collection we headed off in search of one of our favorite dinner places....TGI Fridays. Fridays has *finally* brought back the oreo madness for dessert (that was our signature dish in High School) so we got to rest our weary feet and enjoy some good food. Then it was back to the hotel to turn in before the race on Sunday.

Sunday morning dawned cold but dry at least. Our wave of the race didn't start until 7:55am but bag drop off had to be completed by 7:15am so it was a little chilly standing in the corral for 45 min before we started. This time however we actually started with everyone instead of 10 min after (a few years ago we got stuck in the port a potty line!). We made it all 10 miles and this was probably our strongest finish of all the "twin" races we've done. I was very thankful for the slower-than-normal pace for me because I definitely was not as well trained as I would have liked to be thanks to all the concussion and neck stuff.  If you want to see any of our race pictures they are at:
http://www.marathonfoto.com/index.cfm?action=site.login&RaceOID=18572011W1&LastName=GRANT&BibNumber=13244&spMAILINGID=36163858&spUserID=Nzc5ODU0OTUyOAS2&spJOBID=98360811&spREPORTID=OTgzNjA4MTES1

After the race we got cleaned up and headed off to the concert I had to play in Sunday afternoon. Kris was *supposed* to come to the concert however since Jill (our GPS) decided not to recognize any D.C. addresses on Sunday it took him an extra few hours to find us...but we finally made it back to Baltimore.  Sunday night I introduced Meg to Jeff Dunham (one of Kris and I's favorite comedian) and made sure she saw his Prius sketch. (If you haven't seen it here is the youtube link...it's absolutly hysterical since he owns the exact same car down to the "sparkly powder blue" color that we do!)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GQcSOP2AzXU


Sadly Twin had to leave on Monday morning to return back to reality but overall we had another memorable weekend that of course flew by way too fast!


~Courtney