The first morning I walked to the White House and returned, which took me around 30 minutes total. Nothing too eventful took place, but the weather certainly was perfect. That evening we walked around looking for a place to eat and eventually landed in Zed's, which was a wonderful Ethiopian restaurant.
The second morning I walked to the Lincoln monument, which took around 45 minutes one way. When I arrived at the feet of Lincoln's statue, an elderly man arrived having run up the many steps and saluted Lincoln. He turned around and told the guard standing watch that this was his favorite day of the week as he ran and saluted Lincoln every week on this day. That was interesting and odd at the same time. The last time I saw the Lincoln monument was several years ago with the whole family. We got a cab to take us there from the Space Museum as the final part of our educational trip for the kids. That was a fond memory as the kids were very young. The only bad thing was that I could not find the car as a parking space was very hard to find so I parked on a side street very far from the Washington Mall, or huge green grass lawn.
In the evening we walked to a Chinese restaurant and then proceeded to the Mall at the end where the Lincoln monument is located. We went by the Vietnam monument, which I had seen in the morning, except this time there were thousands of teenagers on field trips present. It reminded me of my boss in Saudi who was an American in Vietnam. He told me he never smoke nor drank before going to Vietnam. He was very pleasant at work, but had serious alcohol issues. Every night he got staggering drunk, which was quite a chore for Saudi where alcohol is banned. I felt sorry for him, but avoided talking to him in the evening as he was so well intoxicated that nothing made sense that he said. He was not the only one that caught this disease in Vietnam. We continued to the Korean monument, which for me was the highlight of my time in D.C. We then proceeded to the Franklin Delano Roosevelt monument down the road, which was second favorite thing. It was getting dark, and the teenagers were still roaming around, but the waterfalls were lite and it was so pleasant as the monument is right on the lake on the opposite side from the Jefferson monument. As we headed back to the hotel we stopped by the Washington monument. Even though it was way past my bedtime we stopped by the Old Ebbitt Grill for dessert. I saw on the sign out front that it was founded in 1865 and it was located right across the road from the White House. I am sure for the day that I walked way over 7 miles.
The third morning, I walked to the US Capitol building. It was just as far a walk as to the Lincoln monument the morning before. On the way back I walked by the Old Post Office, which I mistook for the National Cathedral as it looked just like an old church. In the evening I went with one of the conference attendees by Metro to the airport. I really enjoy having a subway, but we will never see on in this area of NC where we live.
Now that I have covered all of the high points of my trip, I have to regress and cover how we got to D.C. I left the house around 1pm as I needed to pick up the car tags from the dealer for our SUV on the way to the airport. I was at the gate at 1:30pm for my 3pm flight. Our flight was late but was sat on the tarmac, I could see other planes next to our waiting. They made an announcement that the weather had caused all outbound flights to be canceled, so we went back to the gate. Total chaos set in as people were everywhere trying to get information on their flights. The rain started coming down heavily after the black clouds rolled in, so I was glad we did not take off in our very small plane. One of the people I was with got on the phone to call our airline and for the next hour was able to reschedule all 7 of us on a different airline. We finally took off around 9:30pm and was at the Metro waiting for a subway train at 10pm. We had to wait for a train as an announcement was made that the Washington Nationals baseball game had just ended and trains were overly crowded. When we got to the main hub downtown, the whole underground was full of people as far as you could see. Somehow we kept pushing until we got to the transfer train and we finally arrived at the hotel at 11:30pm. Not bad, 10 hours of elapsed time to travel by plane for 30 minutes, when we could have driven in 4 hours. At least the whole time was not like the start of our trip!
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