His Excellency's Home

Yogurl found some stuff that she really wanted from IKEA. Unfortunately, or fortunately, there isn't one nearby. She was going to order the stuff online, but they wanted over $300 for shipping, which was more than the cost of the stuff she wanted! We found an IKEA in Woodbridge, which is just shy of a two hour drive from here. So we were getting ready to go yesterday morning when I stopped and thought, are we really driving all this way just to go to IKEA? Women reading this probably all just thought "Yeah, what's wrong with driving for two hours to get to IKEA?" We looked online and Yogurl pointed out that Mount Vernon wasn't too far from Woodbridge. So that was settled. Then we also realized that a few more miles up the road was a Trader Joe's and so that was settled, too. We had a great day, even if drivers near DC are just as bad as Californians.

Mount Vernon was really nice. I love Monticello, but Mount Vernon is definitely more impressive.

The house is beautiful, and the grounds are incredible. The back of the house overlooks the Potomac, and it is really a stunning view. One thing I thought was really cool that I had to include a picture of is the siding on the house. It is wood that is beveled to look like stone. Then when they painted it, they threw sand onto the paint to give it a rough stone-like look. I thought that was pretty cool.

When we were driving up we saw an exit sign that said there was a Stonewall Jackson Shrine (turns out this is where General Jackson died). I wanted to stop there, but Yogurl said we had too much to do and we might be able to stop on the way home. Not long after that, we heard a commercial on the radio about a place called Colonial Cupcakes in downtown Fredericksburg. If you don't know at which of those two places we stopped on the way home, you don't know my wife very well.