Washington DC Spring Break Part 1

So I guess the biggest news is that Sam surprised me with my birthday present a week in advance so I could have it on our trip. He got me a Canon T3i for my birthday! WOohoo! I am in love! The pic above was taken by my lovely sister with her own wonderful camera and best portrays what I looked like during a lot of the trip. Between her and Sam's brother Jeff, I've been getting some great tips on how to use my camera to it's full advantage and this trip was the perfect way to get in a lot of practice. So these next few posts are total picture overload (no, really) but it's mainly because we were trying to learn and practice a lot with our camera.

Now on to our trip! This is the first spring break we have had in probably 5 or 6 years or so (BYU doesn't have spring break, instead you get let out a week earlier).. We decided to spend our week out in DC visiting my sister Kristin and Neal and doing a little site seeing. We both love the city and were excited to have some time to see some fun stuff this trip. And it was SO fun visiting with Kristin and Neal and their kids. We had a blast! We started out with a nice hike with all the kids on our first morning. Such a beautiful trail with parts of it leading right next to the Patomac River and lots of fun streams. It was awesome:

THE Patomac:

Sam and I would switch off with who had Ivy and who had the camera for much of the week. It's so fun to be learning a new hobby with him! He takes better pics than I do most of the time, lol:

These next couple of Ivy were taken with Kristin's 50mm lens. It was super cool but sort of difficult. I will have to practice with my camera a lot more before getting one of those bad boys...

The next day Sam and I decided to catch the metro into the city to go to lunch and to walk around the DC mall area. It was about a 40 min ride and Ivy loved every bit of it. I was fairly nervous on how she'd do but she thought it was a fun ride. :)

These are the only trees we saw in all the area that were actually blooming. I'm not even sure they are cherry blossoms but we pretended that they were, haha.. Someday we will time it just right to see the infamous cherry blossoms in the city:

I spy Olivia and Fitz! Haha ok not really:

We walked from the Washington Monument down to the Lincoln Memorial.. Vietnam Memorial on the way:

One of my favs:

These were taken the next morning, trying out Kristin's 50mm lens again. Then I tried her telephoto lens after that (the last two pics). I was way across the room so I didn't bother the kids while snapping away. It was cool.

I just love this little bedhead bug:

Little Einstein's is veryy important:

To be continued...