7 August 2010: Chantilly, Virginia, Washington, D.C., and Columbia, Maryland

This vacation is somewhat different than the past couple. If you've read this blog, know me, or am somehow intrigued by that statement and just spent a few hours reading of our past vacations on this travel log, you know that the past couple of years, Cin and I traveled to Bora Bora, a few countries in Europe, and other fun places. All of these vacations were very logistically intense and required a lot of planning and effort to get a lot of things in. While they were amazingly fun and great trips, we decided that this year would be less intense so we picked a cruise. Our cruise leaves tomorrow, 8 August, from Baltimore, and will sail first to Port Canaveral, Florida, and then on to two stops in the Bahamas. Should be pretty sweet. But, that is tomorrow, so let's talk about today and the first day of vacation.

Today, we met up with our friend (and Cin's co-worker), Erinn, her husband Jim, and their daughter Z, and headed down to Chantilly, Virginia. First up was Cracker Barrel for a delicious breakfast. I had a huge meal of four pieces of sourdough french toast, some bacon, turkey sausage, and two eggs. Delicious, as always. We then headed to the Dulles Expo Center for BrickFair 2010 (website is here). This is an annual show/convention based on Lego bricks, where people exhibit what they've built using Lego. The exhibits range from huge cityscapes, to the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man from Ghostbusters, to working twenty foot tall cranes, to working Ferris wheels. Amazing displays. We spent a good two hours or so there and saw everything, which was quite fun. We then departed and headed into Washington, DC, where we met up with my sister and her boyfriend to see how progress on their new place was going and then had lunch at Chop't (website is here). They make a delicious custom made salad and, despite our huge breakfast, I ate it all. After that, we headed back home.

We packed up for the trip tomorrow and then headed to our friends, Danny and Suzy's, place for her birthday. We relaxed there for a while and then headed to Michael's Pub, where we had some good times. We left somewhat early as the next day was going to be quite busy. Bring on the cruise!