Day 17 -- Washington, D.C.

When I picture Washington, D.C., in the summer, I imagine sweltering temps, high humidity and crowds of hot, cranky tourists. Yesterday was unseasonably cool and cloudy. Today, not so much, as a heat wave rolled in and jacked up the temperature by at least 20 degrees.

It’s supposed to get up to 100 degrees by Thursday. Today it was only supposed to be about 90 -- maybe the coolest day of the week. So today’s the day we decided to do the zoo.

We took a 20-minute Metro ride to the Stanley Park, then walked a few blocks to the front gates of the National Zoo. We had avoided the hotel’s complimentary (and kind of scuzzy) breakfast buffet this morning, opting instead for granola bars in the car on the way to the Rockville station. So, by the time we got to the zoo gates, we were hot and hungry. Good thing there was a frozen yogurt shop across the street.

At first glance, I thought this place was a laundromat. There is an entire wall with built-in frozen-yogurt dispensers -- 16 flavors in all -- 30 different toppings -- and it’s all self-serve. At check-out, your cup is weighed and you are charged accordingly. Charlie, of course, generously helped himself, and his cup of gummi worm-topped fro-yo alone cost more than seven bucks.

So, bolstered by that fabulous and fortifying second breakfast course, we had the energy to take on the zoo. The highlights, of course, were a few fleeting looks at the pandas. They were hot, too, I suppose, and kind of restless, and were moving in and out between their outside habitat and their indoor viewing room.

By about 3 p.m, the zoo was baking and we were pooped, but we were not done. We hopped back on the Metro and took it downtown to the International Spy Museum, where we spent a couple of hours exploring fantastic interactive exhibits covering the history of espionage and featuring displays of ultra-cool spy gear from the last century, including bugging devices, lock-picking kits and lipstick pistols. Charlie and Clare enjoyed actually (I’m not kidding here) crawling around in the air ducts a la “Mission Impossible.”

A few blocks from the museum, we grabbed some take-out, then took the Metro to the Marine Veterans Memorial, near Arlington National Cemetery. We perched ourselves on the hillside overlooking the lawn, ate our sandwiches (avocado and pine nut wraps with chilled sweet-pea and mint soup!), and joined hundreds of other spectators who had come to watch a sunset parade featuring the United States Marine Drum and Bugle Corps and Marine Corps Silent Drill Platoon; it takes place every Tuesday evening through the summer.

It had been a long, hot day, and the kids were pretty trashed. So we didn’t stay to the end. It was still about a 45-minute Metro ride back to Rockville, and as soon as we got back to our hotel room, we all fell right into bed.