Sunday in Virginia

On Sunday of our DC trip, we went to a ward about 5 miles from our hotel, Crystal City Ward. It was a fairly large ward with a lot of young families. Relief Society was so large we met in the chapel and then divided into two classes. The meetinghouse was a large, two-story, colonial-looking red-brick building. We enjoyed our visit there.

In the afternoon, we drove to Martin and Sybil's apartment and and they directed my driving (I did all the driving because of Rod's injuries) on a tour of Vienna, VA, where they had previously lived. We saw their old house and some beautiful semi-rural areas with lush foliage. They showed us a popular fresh produce open-air market that had a wide variety of locally grown apples. Rod and I went back later in the week to purchase some apples to bring home. We got Winesap, Nittany ?, York, Jonagold. Very good apples.
We went to dinner at a Thai restaurant - a first for Rod and me. We found the food to our liking. Then it was back to the hotel to rest for the long day of site-seeing ahead of us.

As we were planning this vacation, we decided that with such a long hotel stay we wanted to be sure and have comfortable beds to sleep in. Radisson has "select-comfort" beds (you know, the ones were you pick you level of firmness) like we have at home so we splurged and chose to stay there. We had requested a regular room with a king bed. When we checked in, we were informed there were no king rooms available and we had been upgraded to a suite. Because we had already paid for the room (it was a package deal purchased back in June) we didn't have to pay anything extra. However, the only thing "suite" about the room was it was large and had a couch and two comfortable easy chairs. The bathroom was the usual small hotel room size. And, you had two choices when it came to parking your car -- on the street with metered parking during the day ($1.00/hr 6 AM - 6 PM with a 2-hour limit) or pay $18/day in the parking garage. We chose the latter. We also used the Metro train system to maneuver DC. It was comfortable and roomy but, by the end of our stay, we were glad to be headed home.