D.C.'s Cherry Blossom Festival

Alton and I met up in Washington, D.C., a couple of weekends ago to check out this year's Cherry Blossom Festival. We did the same thing last year, earlier in the festival, only to suffer through a miserably cold and foggy weekend. We were hoping for better luck this time around, and the weather did not disappoint.

I was suffering from a cold, so we had to keep things pretty low key. Still, I managed to haul myself out of the hotel early enough for us to catch the parade. I think that was the first time I'd ever had the chance to see a parade balloon in person. We weren't positioned to catch the greatest photos. This is by far the best one I ended up taking:

After the parade, we wandered over to where the Japanese street festival was being held. We watched a few weapons demos, a strange musical performance, and then perused the offerings of the vendors.

Several stalls had gorgeous paper crafts on display. One vendor had roll after roll of gorgeous washi paper. I bought a kit to make an "oshie" flower. It's supposed to go on a notecard. I think we all know that it will eventually find its way onto a scrapbook page documenting our weekend adventures!

And what would a street festival be without street festival food? We enjoyed some chicken satays, egg rolls (okay, Alton had the egg roll), and a funnel cake. I think we both might have sampled more of the Asian fare if the lines hadn't been so darned long. We saw several people walking by with some interesting food. The most intriguing to me was some sort of dessert served inside a tiny pineapple. Wish we could have found that stall!

Next, we wandered over towards the Washington Monument and watched a local tap dance group perform, then headed back to the hotel to prepare for round 2 of our adventures. That evening, we went back out and had dinner at an Ethiopian resaurant in Georgetown. Yum! After dinner, Alton wanted to try to get some photos of a couple of the monuments after sunset. Unfortunately, the GPS on his phone kind of sucked. Let's just say that we saw a lot of our nation's capitol that night, some of it several times! In the end, we did make it to the WWII Memorial. It was the first time either of us had seen the monument, and I enjoyed taking it all in while Alton took some images. I tried to take a couple of snapshots too, but I do not have the skills to take a decent nighttime photo. Yet. Cold or not, it was a nice weekend hanging out with my man.