DC trip 1st day

I work for an events organizing company that organizes the National Independence Day Parade in Washington, D.C. ( http://www.july4thparade.com/ ) , along with the Memorial Day Parade and various festivals and concert events all over the world. It's a lot of fun and I've been working for them for forever. I love it.

This 4th of July a small group of us from work went to D.C. to help work the Parade, as well as the Pueri Cantores American Festival. I got to take Jeff with me and we left the boys with their grandparents (THANK YOU for helping us!!!!)

We had a great time!! The trip was exhausting, busy, and really sweaty (holy humidity!) but lots of fun. And Jeff was such a huge help! It was his first trip to DC, and unfortunately we were too busy to do any site seeing. But we had a fabulous time anyway!! We took a red eye flight on July 2, and arrived early the morning of the 3rd. That day we checked out some of our concert venues and watched a couple of our groups perform.

This is Old Town Alexandria City Square (with Boomer being goofy off to the side)

The first concert was a mariachi group that is actually from Arizona. They performed an AWESOME concert in Old Town Alexandria and they were incredible! These kids were so impressive! I loved it!

The Mariachis

Then Jeff and I and Boomer (a co worker) and his wife Kristen walked down to Christ Church. We use this as one of our performance venues. It's beautiful, and is known as George Washington's church and Robert E. Lee's Church.

We saw some other performance venues that we use - including the National Cathedral. Then we were off to the Pueri Cantores Festival rehearsal in the National Shrine. First off, Pueri Cantores is an organization of Catholic Youth Choirs. Pueri Cantores is based all over the world and every year there is an international Pueri Cantores Choir Festival. This year over the 4th of July was the American Federation of Pueri Cantores Festival - composed of American Catholic youth choirs to make a choir of 400 + voices! http://www.musiccelebrations.com/festivals/2008/pueri_cantores_festival.html

They sang on the steps of the National Archives to kick off the parade, and then they sang in a mass in the National Shrine, the largest Catholic Basilica in the Western Hemisphere. I tell you - those Catholics kick our rears in terms of accoustics in their buildings. Blow you away, it was an amazing sound!

Anyway. We help with their festivals and bring the choirs there and make arrangements and whatnot. So we went to the rehearsal to help out. That night we hit our Parade planning meeting, and then it was off to bed.