Wednesday, December 9, 2009

Mt. Vernon Candlelight Christmas Tour

We finally got Tickets! Erik and I have wanted to get tickets to this Candleight Christmas Tour since we moved here.  We started out our Christmas themed night with a delicious meal at Columbia Firehouse in Old Town. The food was fantastic and the building is 126yrs old and gorgeous. It's like an old fashioned cigar bar with intricately etched wood paneling, funky staircases and old phone booths.

After dinner we went to Mt. Vernon and drastically underestimated how hard it would be to find in the dark - it's pretty rural (compared to DC) out there. Once we finally found Mt. Vernon we realized how much of the "tour" was outside. We naively thought the "tour" referenced the inside of the home, not the grounds.

Mt.. Vernon on a nice, warm, sunny day :)




Mt. Vernon does a great job shepherding hordes of people around the grounds. We were given the nametag of a famous visitor (we were Silas D.) and we went around in a small group of about 10 people. One of the highlights of the tour for me was the fact they handed out gingersnaps and hot cider to everyone before we entered the house. Unfortunately, we were the last group through and they'd run out of cider before we got there! I debated asking for a refund but Erik wouldn't let me.

So they have a camel at Mt. Vernon... who knew? His name is Aladdin and as you can tell he wasn't very interested in having his picture taken. This is the only picture I have of the whole night because you aren't allowed to take pictures inside the house and it was dark outside, duh.

Little Aladdin



He looks like he is in trouble and somebody made him stare into the corner and think about what he did wrong.

The three most striking things to me were 1. George Washington is buried at Mt. Vernon, 2. The View from Mt. Vernon is drop dead gorgeous and probably worth billions considering it's right on the Potomac and it's across from a National Park (aka no lights), 3. The house is really small, but it's probably not fair to compare it to something like the Biltmore... The only big things were the chimneys





You could rent that chimney for about $600 in DC.

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