If I had written this blog post this morning, I would probably have entitled this post: “Missing medication”, “Sleeping through a Thunderstorm”, “Tick bites”, or even – “When parents start to lose it…” but really we were just getting started. The real adventure began much later.
The morning started out wonderfully. The church ward in D.C. was only about 10 minutes away, and I was so impressed by the wonderful people that were there. I felt humbled to listen to the testimonies of these fellow saints, several of them were from Sierra Leone and Nigeria. Some of them had gotten asylum status to flee their countries, and they were working hard to earn enough money to bring their families back over to the United States. Their testimonies were so strong, and it was touching to hear about their faith in God and how happy they were to have the hope to live in America and raise their families in this great country.
After a nap, and trying to rest in our sopping wet tent, we headed off towards the capitol, to visit the Jefferson, Washington and Lincoln Memorials. After all the troubles we’d had with finding places, we started our adventure with a prayer that we would find the place where they were, and that we could find a place to park our huge van! We drove there easily, and were so happy to find a parking place along the river there, conveniently easy to walk to all the monuments.
The day looked blue and calm. We hoped we wouldn’t have another storm like we had last night. We visited the Jefferson Monument and we were impressed with how much God seemed to inspire these men. Their awareness about God and his desires was amazing.
Afterwards, we planned to visit the Washington memorial, but just after I took this picture (within a minute) we got hit by a microburst storm. We weren’t close enough to the monuments to get inside, so we hid behind a refreshment stand, trying to get cover from the rain. My little 6 year old was crying loudly that it was a tornado, and that we were all going to die. The wind was really strong.
I lifted the two youngest into the window of the shop to try and give them some more cover, and the two workers were kind enough to let them and my 9 year old stay in as well. They fed them M&M’s and supplied us with large plastic trash bags to cover us. It lasted a good half an hour, and by the end, we were drenched!
It was fun though, trying to keep our kids calm, we sang “The Spirit of God”, “There is Sunshine in my soul today”, and “True to the Faith”. It was fun.
Afterwards, the storm cleared, and we prayed for one hour to visit the Lincoln Memorial. (The Washington one was closed due to the Lightning). It was still raining just a tiny bit, so we took the plastic bags that we were given to us and made little rain ponchos to wear for the walk over.
We were impressed again by the reverential temple like feeling that was there. Abraham Lincoln was a great man.
On our way back, we saw the fireflies coming up dancing up along the bay. Because of the heat, mists seemed to swirl up from the road. We made it back to our van just as the sprinkles began to again start raining. We pretty much had our one hour window for which we were very grateful.
It’s not the kind of thing that you hope is going to happen that day, but because it did, we will probably remember this day, more than most! It was an adventure!