Mount Vernon

 We loved Mount Vernon!  It was totally worth the substantial amount of money!

Here we are in front of George Washington's actual house.  You can see a bit beyond the house, that it's sitting on a bluff overlooking the Potomac River - very beautiful.

We got a full tour of the house (no photos allowed) and it is set up exactly as it was at the time of Washington's death, right down to the shades of paint.

The location is really beautiful, and we spent quite a bit of time wandering through the gardens and outbuildings.  This is the view from the back lawn.

The kids had fun with the adventure maps provided to them at the outset.  It was Talk Like a Pirate Day (Did you notice the eye patch?  I didn't at the time.), and it took us a while to realize that they do these maps all the time.

 We had spent several hours there before we realized that there was a separate museum (I mean really?  The whole place is a museum!).  That was partly because they built the museum part underground so that you could still see Mount Vernon as George Washington saw it.

I must say, we see a lot of museums, and theirs was fantastic!  It was every bit the equal of a Smithsonian.  It also had a 4D theater with real fog and snow (snow!) and so forth.

And they had a children's section with dress ups, games, head cut outs, crafts and all sorts of great things for 8 and under.

The whole thing was very, very well done, and we loved it!