A great way to start the week, we completed a marathon of walking, 26+ miles around DC in 4 days, not bad going. We walked the Mall and the Tidal Basin as all the cherry blossoms are in bloom and the city celebrates this with a festival. It is stunning. The memorials here are very, very impressive.

Poor Courtney was subjected to her food hell this week. We had Ethiopian food on Monday night. No one else seemed to be trying the spicy raw beef and I mean raw. Not sure why not, trust me to order it! The rest of it was good but not something I’ll be rushing back to. Tuesday and we’re doing Indian, Court doesn’t like spicy. The restaurant was amazing with really fabulous flavoured dishes. It’s one of the top 5 in DC and I have to say it earned it. Our fish starter was really great, a superb corriander and chilli rub coated the fish, superb. Their main courses were just perfect.

Time to start winding down the pace and sadly time for Court to fly back to Chicago to her two girls and husband. It was lovely to see her.

Brooke put me to work though. She had me fit three new dimmer switches and all her shelving switched sides in her bedroom, not to mention a TV tuner fitted to her computer. I have my uses obviously. Sal, Brooke’s boyfriend, certainly enjoyed his new remote control lighting.

So on to more caching. I spotted a Wherigo cache in DC and having never done one it was time to head off and give it a whirl. We took the DC Metro which puts the London tube to shame with the exception of the tube map, London’s still better by far. Granted the tube was built years ahead of the DC metro.

So the cache turned out to be fairly short but spurred me into wanting to design one for myself. Watch this space and you should see one in and around the Cambridge area. Following on from that we went and did a webcam cache. It’s where you need to get to the correct spot, log onto a webcam and capture a picture of you on it. Not the easiest of tasks when the only web connected phone you have doesn’t have a screen grab feature, Windows Phone fail. I had to use my iphone to take a picture of Brooke’s phone with the webcam on it. This was her first webcam cache and only my second.

The rest of the time in DC was all about food and technology with one exception. Brooke joined the modern world when I got her to buy an Apple TV. They’re so much better in the US with Netflix. We ended up chilling in front of movies. I bought a copy of Windows 7 so I can design a Wherigo cache. I’m sure it will have other uses.

On the food front I cooked for Brooke and Sal. Prawns two way’s for starter (Thai and Satay), roasted vegetable couscous, La Mams famous tomato salad, herb crusted rack of lamb and a salad. Yum.

The exception to food and technology was I took Brooke to the Ice Hockey to see the Caps (Washington Capitals). Buying tickets really late meant we were not going to be ringside. I wasn’t expecting though to be on the very back row of the 4th tier of seating. It didn’t matter though. What a brilliant experience it was and to top it off the Caps won in overtime. Of course we had a couple of swift halves during the game and a couple more later on.

So I’m back home now to end week 5. Time to start planning another couple of days away and some swimming training. I’m doing the Great North Swim, a mile in lake Windermere, in June. Anne’s knee is fixing and she’s back in the pool. I need to make sure I can give her a good run for her money.