Beautiful Mount Vernon- Home of Washington

Trip date: February 16, 2019. Saturday.

I wrote this article with a painful finger that got injured when running away from a shooting incident at a shopping mall in Maryland last night (more on this later).

My wife, a friend of mine and I took an invitation from president George Washington to be a guest in his home at Mount Vernon, Virginia yesterday. Having the president’s day weekend upon us, there was no better time to visit the first president’s home than now.

After a three-hour drive, we arrived at the estate. The day was nice and sunny with temperature over 40s.

The Washington family couldn’t pick a better place to build a home that’d once be occupied by an army general and the first president of a newly created nation.

The Mount Vernon is located on the hill top by the Potomac river bank. The facility is quite large which includes the mansion, a few small houses which were used for various purposes including laundry, smokehouse, animal shelters, etc., a farm, gardens, tombs of Washington family members including himself, trails, forests and more.

Upon arrival, we purchased our not-so-cheap entrance passes. Our passes included a complimentary tour of the mansion, a short movie about the president, access to the museum and education center, and self guided tour of the entire estate.

On our way to the mansion we stopped by a large building adjoining the flower garden. This building once housed the slaves in multiple rooms like the one shown below. These slaves were tasked with various jobs including serving the Washington’s guests.

At the mansion, we were given the tour of the house Washington lived and died in. Photography wasn’t allowed inside the mansion. We toured the house next to the mansion that housed the servants that arrived with Washington’s guests, dancing room, guest rooms, dining room, parlor, and the other private parts of the mansion restricted to guests and everyone else and used only by the Washington’s family members. The section of the mansion private to Washington included Washington’s bedroom, his office and study rooms, and a few other rooms.

Other buildings in the estate houses Washington’s horse riding car, smokehouse, animals, etc.

We toured the museum and education center where we saw colonial american history and some battles Washington led and other information about him. At age 19, Washington was also a surveyor.

We spent around 4 hours in the estate. We finally watched a short movie about Washington’s life focused primarily on his military and political careers. In addition, we visited the tombs.

On our way back, we drove to DC and spent a couple hours.

We then drove to Maryland and stopped at Arundel Mills mall to have dinner at Nando’s Peri Peri restaurant. This’s where we lost control of our plans. As we were waiting to be seated at the restaurant, I noticed a wave of hundreds of people screaming and rushing out from the opposite end of the mall hallway from where we stood. Right away, we thought this doesn’t look good and we must get out. People don’t scream and run like this for fun, it looked like something bad was happening and they were running for their lives.

Our amygdalae got fully activated and we ran towards the exit next to us. On the way out the multi doors exit, somebody in the crowd inadvertently pressed my hand against the door handle and peeled off some skin of one of my fingers. I didn’t feel anything at the moment but later found the finger to be bleeding.

We safely exited the mall with thousands of other people and quickly walked to find our car. We left the area immediately. Police clarified the next day that there indeed was a targeted shooting and one person got shot in the lower torso.