The Government is CLOSED!

Living in DC certainly has its advantages. This is where the capital of the free world is, many beautiful monuments paying tribute to past presidents and leaders, free museums of art, American history a plenty and the National Government. As I’m sure many are aware, there was a debacle in Congress about government funds, Obamacare and other things (I’m not all that sure and I don’t pretend to be highly educated in these matters) and if a decision wasn’t made by midnight October 1 the American Government would close. Now that seems like a silly thing but apparently this has happened before and in my life time although I had no clue. It was 1995 and I wasn’t living in the United States at the time and neither was my husband so we don’t remember. PLUS! If you’re doing the math we were 8 so there’s that too.

Well to make a long story short, Congress couldn’t decide and that caused the government to shut down. Since Scott and I both work for or indirectly with the federal government we didn’t go to work. That sounds terrible you might say but for us it was great! Because we live free of rent and are trying to save money for our own place, a few days off was a welcomed thing. We’ve been pretty good with our savings so it wouldn’t affect us too much to get a few days of unpaid leave. Also, I’d only get one day off and it was paid leave. My company has other locations that aren’t affiliated with the federal government so they will be sending us to those sites to work.

Since we were banking on the government closing we planned ourselves a fun, fall day. Scott needed to go in to work to fill out his time sheet and finish a few projects so I came with him to help with his commute. He dropped me off at a Starbucks so I could us the wifi and have a place to sit for an hour or two while he was busy. The Starbucks was actually in a Safeway and there was only the coffee bar so I walked down the street looking for another place to sit. I found a Baptist church with benches in a little park and decided that was a good, quite place to read the latest General Conference edition of the Ensign. After about an hour I was getting chilly and started to walk back to the Safeway but along the way I found a little café called Sweetleaf that had wifi and really delicious hot chocolate (I love hot chocolate!). I sat there for another 50 minutes and then Scott was done so we left!

We were getting hungry so we found a really great deli near the DC Temple which was our activity for the afternoon and we grabbed a few sandwiches. They were some of the most delicious sandwiches I’ve ever eaten!

Next, Temple. Beautiful day, beautiful temple, beautiful session. I love the temple!

Finally we made our way back to Manassas to beat the rush hour traffic (yes there was still traffic even with many of the government employees not working). We took a different, longer route home so we could get ice cream at a local ice cream shop called Kline’s Freeze. Yum yummy!

*For the record, I did not take any of these photos. I found them on the internet. We aren't the best about taking pictures in the moment. We remember after we've done something, "Oh! We should have taken pictures!"