The trip to Washington
After 2 years of promising Brent that I would come and visit him I finally took advantage of a 50% seat sale with Air Canada and flew to Dulles airport for $450 return. It’s crazy expensive for how close it is. Oh well. The plan for this trip was to sight-see as much as possible. For Friday night though, Smothers Brothers. You may think you don’t know who they are, but you do. For my generation I think we recognize them from the Shreddies commercials that they did. At their show they showed clips from their old shows and I definitely didn’t recognize any of that. The one brother came out as “Yo-Yo Man” for a bit which was pretty cool. He was quite good at pulling off all his yo-yo tricks. I can (or could) do most of the tricks that he did which made me happy.
Day 2 in Washington we tackled “The National Mall.” I originally thought this was an actual mall. Like lots of shops and stuff. Apparently I’m an idiot. The national mall is actually a national park in Washington, DC where all the museums, Capitol Hill, Washington Monument, Lincoln Memorial, and the white house are. Brent lives in Bethesda, MD so we had to take the metro to get to Washington. Bethesda, the metro and everywhere I was in Washington was uncannily clean. I saw 2 pieces of trash on the street and I think they were both unopened bottles of water. Unlike Montreal, all the metro stations looked the same to me in Washington:
What really blew my mind? Escalators that are outside:
Canada would totally own that escalator.
We walked around the national mall and checked out some sculptures on the way to Capitol Hill. We saw this one sculpture that had a sign beside that said “Woman sitting”. Here is the sculpture:
We stared at it for quite awhile and couldn’t figure out why it was called “woman sitting.” Eventually I looked a little to the left and saw this:
This was my favorite sculpture. Everything else was human, but not this one:
So Capitol Hill looks just like it does on TV except you totally aren’t allowed close to it. They had fences setup around it so this was the closest shot:
The Washington Monument was also, exactly what you’ve seen before:
And the Lincoln Memorial was not a giant ape like The Planet Of The Apes would have you believe.
When we left the Lincoln Memorial I wanted to get a picture with Brent and I with the reflection pool behind us. I set the camera up, set the timer and took the first picture:
Since I wanted to make sure it turned out I figured I would do a 2nd shot. As we waited for the timer I heard to my right “Bill, go further. Further Bill!” Bill just kept walking into our shot so I shouted “No Bill, too far Bill. Nooo Bill!” He thought it was pretty funny that some stranger was yelling his name. He ended up walking into our picture.
We had a good time making fun of Bill for the rest of the weekend. Sadly, he never showed up in any of our photos again.
After that we made a quick stop in at the white house to say hello to Obama. He told us to wait outside the fence so we humored him and did what he said.
Our first museum was the Museum of National History. We walked through here pretty quick. There were lots of gems, dinosaurs and mammals but it wasn’t really my thing.
The next museum was the Air and Space Museum. By this point we were pretty tired so we decided to check out some of their IMAX shows. The first one was “Space Station” followed by “Fight Pilot: Operation Red Flag”. Touring the museum had what you would expect. Planes and space stuff.
By this time it was 5pm so we had 30 minutes to run through the American History museum. There was suppose to be a C-3po costume some place in the museum so that was my goal. We saw “The Ruby Slippers” from The Wizard of Oz:
Seinfeld’s fluffy shirt:
And when we gave up all hope when they were kicking us out, we finally saw C-3po.
The next day we decided to drive to Baltimore (only 45 minutes from Bethesda) to check out the Baltimore Aquarium.
They also had a dolphin show there so I guess we couldn’t pass that up.
The aquarium was pretty awesome. The line-ups were crazy to get in. We bought our tickets at 10am but weren’t allowed inside until 1pm. We walked around Baltimore a bit but I wasn’t overly impressed with what I saw. Granted, we only walked around the harbor and little Italy.
The day I was leaving I only had half a day to kill so we decided on going to the International Spy Museum. The museum was setup like you were going through spy training. It starts off with you picking an identity in the first room with a bunch of facts about you. Throughout the museum you were asked different questions about your identity. There were lots of spy gadgets, guns, bugs, and interactive displays. My favorite part was crawling through the air ducts trying to make as little noise as possible to not set off the alarms. No photos were allowed in the spy museum so I’ve got nothing for that.
So that was my trip to Washington. I really liked the city overall. I can see how you could spend a lot more time sight-seeing. Definitely more than 2 days for the museums would be a good idea. All my Washington trip photos are up on flickr as usual.