I spy...a favorite thing!

I'm linking up today with Mockingbird Hill Cottage and its weekend sharing of A Favorite Thing, so please take a few moments over the next week to read and enjoy all the special favorites that have been posted here.  Today I want to share a final moment from our D.C. trip, which fast turned into a favorite thing that my son and I still reminisce and laugh about!  I've mentioned it before, but my entire family are HUGE '24'/Jack Bauer fans.  We faithfully watched all eight seasons of this television series, which involved agent Jack Bauer (played by Kiefer Sutherland) saving the country, one 24 hour period at a time. 

But of course long before there was Jack, I had fallen in love with all sorts of spies...from the dashing and oh so brave Scarlet Pimpernel during the tumultuous times of the French Revolution and the handsome look-alike Rudolph Rassendyll who saves Ruritania from ruin in the gripping Prisoner of Zenda to the foggy streets of London where Holmes and Watson tenaciously pursued the criminal masterminds, I've loved my spy novels.  I gobbled them up like candy...the WWII spies in Ken Follett's novels like The Eye of the Needle, Triple (oh how I love Nat Dickstein!), and Key to Rebecca, the cold war novels of Helen MacInnes, and on to modern espionage agents like Gabriel Allon in Daniel Silva's novels and all American hero/spy Mitch Rapp in Vince Flynn's thrillers. 

And of course, I can't overlook this favorite spy!

I've passed my little private 'espionage high' on to my family, and we all have our own favorite spies and 'enquiry agents' (if you aren't familiar with Will Thomas's recent novels involving equiry agent Cyrus Barker and his assistant Thomas Llewellen, or Anne Perry's William and Hester Monk series I recommend them heartily!).  My oldest son loves Bond, James Bond, and the Holmes/Watson duo, while my husband and youngest son are partial to Mitch Rapp.  My middle son holds the family 'wow' factor for having met and worked with several of the actors from '24', including Kiefer Sutherland and Carlos Bernard (who played the handsome but conflicted Tony Almeida in the series). 

Which leads me to my favorite thing of the week...my special surprise treat to my son while we were in D.C...tickets to the newly opened International Spy Museum!  We had a ball, browsing all the exhibits and reading about the history of spies from George Washington's era up to the present.  We saw an Enigma machine, shoes with transmitters built into the heels, concealment rings, fountain pen cameras, lipstick pistols, lethal umbrellas, eyeglasses with concealed cyanide capsules...all the master spies' tricks of the trade.

And the piece de resistance? Special admission to Operation Spy, a one hour, adrenaline fueled interactive experience, where we received new identities and set off on a mission to save the world from evil, with only an hour to prevent a catastrophe in the fictional country of Kandahar. We were pitched against another family in a mad race against time, decrypting secret audio conversations, penetrating and escaping from a high-security compound, and interrogating a suspect agent as part of our mission.

What can I say?  The other family didn't stand a chance.  We'd watched too many episodes of '24' to let our family back home down...we rose to the occasion, saved the world, and even had time for ice cream in the snack shop, where we purchased a great cd collection of Music to Spy By.  All in the day of a spy, or more correctly, two wanna-be spies from Wisconsin.  And that all made for a wonderful favorite memory!  

Here's a little poem by one of my favorite spies, Percy Blakeney, Baronet, from The Scarlet Pimpernel. Click here to watch the incredible Leslie Howard in his gifted recitation of "The Demned Elusive Pimpernel."  No one ever did it better than he!