Caught In The Whirlwind
Posts tagged washington dc
[Plinky] Nicest Place
Aug 18th 2009
What’s the nicest place you’ve stayed?
I’ve stayed at the Courthouse Hilton Garden Inn, Arlington VA two times, on both of my most recent trips to Washington DC. It’s nothing terribly fancy, but it’s very nice. Good rooms, good service, great location. It’s easy to get to, but within easy walking distance of a metro station giving access to pretty much everything worth going to in DC.
Furthermore, as we just discovered on the last trip, if you walk north about 2 blocks you find all sorts of nice stores and restaurants. And if you don’t feel like walking, the hotel’s restaurant offering is pretty darn good too. And very nicely priced.
I’ve pretty much decided that if I’m going to Washington, DC…this is the hotel I’ll be staying at.
Vox Hunt: Holiday. Celebrate.
Dec 12th 2008
Show us a picture from your favorite vacation.
Sitting by the large fountain at the sculpture garden in Washington DC in May 2008. This vacation was probably one of my favorites of all time. Especially this particular day of it. Just hanging out by the fountain and then taking a relaxing walk across the national mall (and getting ice cream/popsicles from a street vendor) was just awesome.
Progressive Roadtrip Report – Day 1
May 25th 2008
Wassy and I have arrived in Washington DC. I'm typing this up this morning while she's getting ready for us to head down for breakfast and the other associated activities of today since I didn't have much time to do so last night. Or the energy for that matter. So…here we go. Well, actually, before we go, I just want to point out that all of the pictures I took (that were deemed acceptable for internet consumption) are located here at flickr.
I left from my place at 5:30am and arrived at her place by 6, as per the scheduled plan. A quick pit stop to gas up the car and we were off driving. Wassy had the wheel first, so I hesitantly turned over the control of the Rogue to her. Not that she's a bad driver or anything…but I'm just a little nervous when other people drive my car. The trip started out pretty foggy. I mean…very foggy. We basically were driving into a cloud as we drove down route 12. Eventually we ended up at around 7:00am stopping at a McDonalds in Norwich, NY for breakfast. At this point in the trip we still didn't really realize that vacation was here at last after weeks of waiting. We were also worried about zombie attack in the fog, considering Norwich had a large pharmaceutical corporation, a hospital and a fairly scary looking cemetary all right next to each other.
I should also mention that I had my first Egg McMuffin as well. We should have taken a picture but alas, I forgot. The trip was proceeding very nicely up to this point, with the only snag being that it seemed like one of Wassy's debit cards wasn't working right. But we pressed onwards anyway, leaving the fog behind us.
We entered pennsylvania ahead of schedule as it seems my time estimates were a bit too large. No problem as it gave us some time along the route to relax a little bit and not have to worry about getting there in time to do anything.
The first thing we noticed in Pennsylvania was that they were offering free coffee 24/7 at rest stops on I81. This seemed…kinda strange as there were actual people manning the free coffee stations. I'd imagine this would get pretty darn borning when nobody needed coffee. Additionally, we questioned the effectiveness of this safety campaign as if you're tired enough to need coffee in order to keep driving, you probably shouldn't be driving in the first place.
The other interesting thing was I81 South through Scranton. We came upon a road sign that told us that to stay on I81 we needed to go to the left when the road split, but the GPS lady was telling us to go to the right. So Wassy decided to follow the GPS lady and we hung a right. And on the right there was another sign saying I81 south, exit right. So we took that exit and ended up on I-81 south…the road that went off to the left. We have no idea how this was physically possible and looking at the intersection in google maps only helps slightly. I think it's a dimensional warp or a wrinke in space-time.
We had planned a stop in Hazleton, PA which was pretty much the midpoint of the journey to get gas and switch drivers. However, at a rest stop earlier I had noted that the vending machine had 3 types of skittles, so that caused Wassy to want something sweet and fruity. Which ended up being Tropical Skittles at the gas station in Hazleton. I got myself a white chocolate big cup peanut butter cup. Mmm… And after Wassy's debit card didn't work at the pump, we determined the problem…she was using the wrong card. Oops. At least it wasn't a big problem.
With me at the wheel, we continued down the road to Washington DC, heading south again on I81. It should be mentioned we passed the fateful exit for Tremont, PA, the run down mining town that we had stopped at for gas on the trip down last year. Thankfully, we were able to bypass that this time around with a little more solid planning.
As we passed through harrisburg though, we began to notice curious signs. Signs that advised us that "Motorcycles are EVERYWHERE". We looked around and saw no motorcycles which eventually led us to believe that we were walking into a motorcycle ambush and they were going to jump out of the trees at us. For the rest of the trip every time we saw a motorcycle, we repeated the phrase "Motorcycles are EVERYWHERE!". Another interesting road sign we passed was for a roadside stop. It advertisded "Snacks. Soda. BEER". With "BEER" being about 4x the size of the snacks and soda part. Other interesting road signs included a billboard for an "Ultima Massage II" with "Tractor Trailer Parking". Uh huh…so that's what they're calling it now.
The most interesting series of road signs though was just outside of Gettysburg. As we were traveling down 15 there was a little white sign on the side of the road advertising "Fresh Honey" or something. And every half mile or so there was another sign. It started off appetizing enough. Fresh honey, hand picked strawberries. But then it turned into things like raw goats milk and strange turkey parts. The two best signs had to be "Do you like pottery?" And then later down the line "We have pottery!", followed by "Meet the potters!".
We decided to skip the exit. We eventually ended up taking a break and eating lunch at a Ruby Tuesday's in Gettysburg which was nice. We had planned at stopping at Arby's but we had enough time to do something a little more healthy and relaxing.
After lunch we took the short drive down and entered Maryland, with the obligitory state sign picture taken by Wassy. The traffic started to pick up here (which is why I had taken the second driving shift, since I was more comfortable with my car.)
Things really started picking up once we got past Frederick, MD. Sorry, I was unable to locate the giant stick they have there. And eventually we arrived at the beltway, which would be more aptly named as a parking lot. It seems that we had finally encountered the memorial day travelers coming into Washington DC.
Things were basically stop and go for about 20 minues, in which we covered about 4-5 miles. Of road. But eventually we got through it and ended up at the hotel, after driving through the scenic roundabout again. Fun.
We arrived a little early expecing not to have a room ready since they made such a big deal about being full up and all. But there was almost nobody in the lobby when I went down and we were able to get a room right away. So after taking our stuff up to the room and getting settled in (Wassy instantly took over the bathroom with her suitcase full of bathroom related items) we headed out for the metro and for a stroll around the national zoo.
The zoo was particularly busy, although I guess we should have been expecting that considering it was a really nice day as well as memorial day weekend. We tried to hit the buildings first because they were going to be closing before the grounds did. The ape house was a madhouse. People everywhere trying to look at the apes, so we wern't really able to see much of anything there.
Eventually though we made our way past the crowds of people to a less crowded part of the zoo where we saw some sea lions and seals. They also seemed to have a lot more fish than I was expecting they would have at the Amazon rainforest type exhibit. Really cool stuff as I had wanted to see some fish at the national aquarium before realizing that the one in DC kinda sucked and the good one was out on Baltimore. But anyway, we saw some really big fish which I took some pictures of which are located in my flickr feed since I don't have the space to stick them here.
I do want to mention though, that the theme of the zoo trip seemed to be animals having a little too much fun together. Well, except the ducks…
We were a little bit concerned at first when two seals looked like they started to go at it in the water. That probably wasn't what was going on of course…but it sure looked like it to us! Take the photographic evidence there as proof. And then we saw a bunch of rapist ducks. It was…strange. There was a bunch of male ducks who were pretty much tackling a female duck. She'd scurry away but then a male would leap on her back and pin her to the ground. Nature at it's finest!
After we got back from the zoo, we went down to the hotel's restaurant which was very nice, just as it was the last time we were here. We had the palce pretty much all to ourselves which was nice because the waiter was right on top of everything. The service is very very nice there. After dinner and desert (mmm, white chocolate cheesecake) we headed out in search of some drinks. We started out at a bar just next door to the hotel (where we discovered the wonders of enjoying a nice Bob Marley. Mmm, fruity goodness), and eventually ended up back at the hotel lounge and then up in the room watching Knocked Up on HBO for a bit before nodding off to sleep (as it turns out we both fell asleep before the end of the movie so nobody knows what happened exactly)
Plans for today are the National Gallery of Art, and then Crab Smashing at night. Vacation continues!
Returning to Washington DC!
Feb 8th 2008
I'm just a bit psyched right now. For around five months now I've been patiently awaiting the announcement of the tour dates for Dream Theater's Progressive Nation 2008 tour. And they finally came yesterday. The news arrived while I was in my Stats class taking a test. Wassy (who was having a lot more trouble waiting than I was) sent me a very excited e-mail that there were tour dates and there was also a show in Albany.
However, it turns out the venue in albany was probably going to be General Admission and that the venue was more of a basketball arena that can also hold concerts. But by the time I got home, she had scouted out the other dates and determined that Washington DC was the way to go.
So off to DC we go. At the moment we're (myself and Wassy that is) planning on going down on Saturday, May 24th a couple days before the show, so that we have part of that saturday and sunday to do some sight seeing. The concert is on the 26th, which also happens to be memorial day. The venue is the Daughters of the American Revolution Constitution Hall, right down near the white house so it'll be easy to find when the time comes. Hopefully all of the memorial day parade activities will be cleared out by the time we need to go through. The parade runs close but not exactly near the venue.
The plan is to head home on the 27th, tired and happy. Now all we need is tickets to the show which haven't gone on sale yet. This wait until the end of May is going to kill me.
Washington DC Trip – Day 4 and 5
Mar 22nd 2007
Day 4 was a low activity day for us. After feeling like we were going to die from all of the walking the night before, we decided to cut back on the planned activities. We dumped Mt. Vernon, the interactive science museum and the aquarium. I was looking forward to the aquarium the most out of all of them, but I'd rather make sure that we did the zoo.
It was a good decision, since we spent the entire afternoon at the zoo. It was (thankfully) a shortish walk away from the metro stop.
There's not really a heck of a lot I can say about activities here since it was mostly just looking at animals. Memorable creatures included the Maned Wolf, which as we learned, has very, very strong smelling urine which they apparently use to communicate.
We saw a lot of birds as well, especially of the common variety. Squirrels and ducks showed up in force, including where they were least wanted…in a crane's water hole. We saw one crane that looked rather annoyed that they were there.
We also saw an Emu that I could have swore was showing off for the camera. It enjoyed hanging out by the fence with all the people there, striking bird like poses and basking in all of the attention.
One of the more active animals we came across was the Red Panda. This little guy was running and jumping all over the place which was semi surprising since the red panda's at the local zoo just tend to sit there and do nothing.
They had Giant Pandas as well, but I was unable get a really good shot of one because of how far away from the fence they liked to hang out.
Unfortunately, my camera battery died about halfway through the zoo, so I wasn't able to get as many pictures as I would have liked. I was so tired from all the walking that when we got back to the hotel room the past two nights, I forgot to charge it. It's got a pretty good battery life otherwise though, as I found out.
Another camera hiccup…it seemed to enjoy focusing on the cages the animals were in and not on the animals themselves. So I ended up getting an awful lot of pictures of wires and bars with fuzzy animals in the background. Oh well…I know for next time.
Lunch was at the zoo. A little over eight dollars for a Mcdonalds style burger and small fries. I suppose it was going to fund animal conservation though, so that's all right. I bought a little stuffed penguin at the panda gift shop even though they don't have penguins at the zoo (figure that one out) and was teased by my friends for collecting "dolls". Everybody has a hobby! There's nothing wrong with it! NOTHING!
Dinner on Day 4 ended up being at the hotel restaurant which ended up being really, really good for a pretty decent price. After that, it was bedtime since we were leaving pretty early the next day in order for me to be back for the second round Syracuse NIT mens basketball game I wanted to see Monday night.
Cut to the next morning we were all feeling pretty blah. We pack up, and go to load up the car. Tragedy strikes…we left the dome light in the back on when we were unpacking…4 days ago. The battery was dead and the maintenance guys with the jumper cables and battery stuff weren't going to get in for another 20 minutes. We waited back in the hotel lobby. Eventually they arrived, but they weren't the brightest group of people in the universe and it took them about an hour and a half to figure out that they needed to bring their truck around and jump start it that way.
Finally we left and after an almost stop-free ride back home, my friends dropped me off at my parents house and then we left immediatley for the game.
Vacation…complete.
For more day 4 pictures, you can check my flickr account. Click here!
Vox Hunt: Weekend Results
Mar 21st 2007
Show us something you did, made, saw or bought this past weekend.
I went to the National Zoo in Washington, DC and took a picture of some Flamingos
Washington DC Trip – Day 3
Mar 21st 2007
I'm really really behind with these writeups because of how exhausted and busy I've been the past couple days…so here's day 3 a couple days late. Day 4 should be up later today.
Day 3 of vacation was re-arranged slightly to account for the fact that we didn't make the Natural History Museum the day before. Jason's (not me…my friend) legs were hurting quite a bit today from all the walking. Mine weren't doing very well either as several blisters had begun to formed on my right foot making walking very painful.
We started out by just barely making it to the International Spy Museum because the Metro was delayed slightly. The museum itself was really cool. To start off they take you up this elevator which gives the impression you're signing up for a school for spies. They told us to pick a cover story from one of 16 located on the walls and memorize the details and then took us into a briefing room to show an introductory video.
At this point it kinda fell down a bit. A lot of the exhibits were fairly interactive, but after that cool start it dropped back down to a fairly normal museum experience with exhibits and things behind glass and such. That's not to say they didn't have a lot of cool things to look at, but it would have been awesome if they carried through their narrative experience through the entire museum.
Unfortunately, no pictures were allowed inside the museum,so I can't show you the cool stuff. I want an umbrella shotgun and a handgun hidden inside of a pipe.
After a slow trek through the museum, we decided to head back to the hotel for a little while to rest our poor, poor feet. On our way back to the hotel, we took a detour to a Safeway that I found near one of the metro stops. What the map didn't mention was that it was a little over a quarter mile uphill. I grabbed every blister bandage I could find as well as some stuff for lunch since we were going to eat in our rooms.
After an hour or two of rest, Two of us (Jason stayed back at the hotel, due to not feeling well) walked out to the Natural History Museum so we could see a whole bunch of dead things. We took a lot of frequent breaks and made good use of all of the benches there.
They had a very well done Orchid special exhibit set up inside which we walked through. I snapped a bunch of pictures of stuff inside there. It was a long room, designed such that it almost looked like it was actually outside.
After the orchids, we moved into fossil town and checked out the dinosaurs. This was the first dinosaur exhibit I've been to since I was a little kid. The dino's were considerably less scary than they were back then.
Then we entered the non dinosaur dead stuff part of the exhibit which houses the mythical Giant Land Sloth. I'd been looking forward to seeing this monster for quite some time after hearing Wassy discuss it. She's a bit scared of it after seeing it the first time she was at the museum and after having some nightmares about it. Obviously, I wanted to see this monster for myself.
Well…it was actually big. I didn't see it as all that scary, but then again, I wasn't the one that had nightmares about it. It was bigger than I thought it would be. Makes me wonder what, exactly, caused them to go extinct and die off.
After going through the fossilized portion of the museum, we went upstairs to check out some of the human history exhibits. My favorites come out of the Egyptian/ancient civilization sections. I've always been interested in ancient Egypt for some reason, so seeing a real live mummy (sort of) was fairly cool.
The Mummy was named after the person who donated it. I'm not entirely sure if I'd like to have a mummy named after me…seems kinda morbid. I'm not sure where the lion mosaic came from, however, the workmanship that must have gone into that is stunning.
Finally, we entered the mineral exhibit with the intent to see the Hope Diamond, which we did. It was smaller than I expected it to be, but still impressive. It's extremely clear and has a nice color to it which you probably can't see in my picture due to the lighting.
At this point, my legs were about to give out on me again, so I requested that we head back to the hotel a little early for some rest before going to Olive Garden that night for dinner.
Olive Garden, simply put…was a disaster. First we got off at the wrong metro stop and had to wait about 20 minutes for another train to roll through…then when we got to the right one, it was a HUGE walk from the station through this stupidly winding sidewalk because the pedestrian bridge was closed. Then the service was TERRIBLE. The absolute worst service I've ever had anywhere. It's best that we try and pretend that this dinner didn't happen.
Based on how everybody was feeling, we made the decision to sleep in on Sunday and skip Mt. Vernon. We also had to drop plans of going to a science museum and had the aquarium on the chopping block if we didn't have time as well.
More picture from day 3 can be seen on my flickr account. Click Here!
Washington DC Trip – Day 2
Mar 18th 2007
I'm a little slow in posting this one because of how tired I was the last couple nights, but…here's what went down on day 2 of the Washington DC Trip.
After the extensive walking of day 1, my feet were killing me and I could feel a couple of blisters forming, but I was generally ok. Day 2 was the Smithsonian day where we planned to visit the Air and Space Museum, the National Gallery of Art and the Natural History Museum.
Unfortunately, the weather was still horrible. Rain and wind earlier, turning into sleet and snow later on. By the time we got to the Air and Space Museum, we were soaked.
First thing on the agenda was to get some tickets for the 12:50 showing of Magnificent Desolation, a 3D IMAX film detailing the Apollo moon landings. After that, we went exploring for a while.
One of the highlights for me was seeing SpaceShipOne hanging in the museum atrium. Back when the X Prize was going on, I was following their progress with real interest since I'm of the opinion that commercial space flight is going to be the way to go in the future in order to innovate in the space travel department. NASA hasn't had the budget to do anything radically different since the Space Shuttle was first created.
One thing I learned that surprised me was that pigeons used to be used as spy plane like devices. Strap a camera on them with a timer and let em fly. I'm not entirely sure how useful this one. I'd guess they'd get an awful lot of pictures of statues and trash cans. Wassy brought up the question about what would happen during mating season…which is something I'd rather not think about.
Then we turned a corner and found a model of the strangest flying machine I've ever seen in my entire life. The thing on the left here is a French designed flying ship that was never actually built, probably for very good reason. There's a barrel hanging below the main ship which contains the food and drinks, accessible only by taking a rope ladder from te deck of the ship all the way down to the barrel. Why the heck did they not stick the barrel INSIDE the ship?!? The kitchen is also hanging down by the barrel.
There's a little "flying machine" on the back, I guess in case somebody wants to take a drive.
One of the coolest parts of the museum though, was the pop culture exhibit. The American History Museum was being renovated but they moved the pop culture stuff from there to the Air and Space Museum. They had a ton of cool stuff there. Highlights included Kermit the Frog from the Muppet Show, Dorthy's ruby slippers from the Wizard of Oz, R2-D2 and C-3PO…
I could go on, but I think I'll just throw some pictures down.
After that, we went through the National Art Gallery. I'm not really an art type guy, so I don't have any pictures or very much to say about this portion. Some cool looking things in there, but my legs were killing me too much to really appreciate it. The Da Vinci panting that Wassy wanted to see was removed for maintenance on the enclosure, unfortunetly. We called off the Art Gallery early in order to go back to the hotel and rest.
We skipped the natural history museum and went out to dinner at Chili's which was really good. After that we went back out to the Capitol Building to take a few pictures since we missed it on Day 1.
That's all until I post what happened on day 3.
More pictures from day 2 can be found on my flickr account by clicking here.
Washington DC Trip – Day 1
Mar 16th 2007
Whew, I'm exhausted…and I've already had a chance to sleep. I did way more walking than I think I've ever done in one day yesterday.
It started out with me getting up at 5am in order to get ready to leave at quarter to six. All went according to plan, my friends arrived and off we went. First stop…dunkin donuts for some coffee, or in my case, white hot chocolate. We had a loooong stop there as the employees at the drive through forgot what we ordered…three times.
After that, we were on our way. Things were fairly uneventful as far as major events until we ended up in a small mining town in Pennsylvania in search of a gas station. We sent Jason in to pay for the gas since this was an old school, non pay at the pump station here. He later said that he felt so out of place in that store. After we got the gas and some lunch at Arby's, we got back on the road.
Then we got to the fun part…the beltway and beyond. The traffic was pretty heavy from the moment we entered Maryland until we got into Arlington. The beltway itself wasn't bad, although we weren't in the inner loop thankfully. Then we took the scenic George Washington Parkway into Arlington where our hotel is. There was one small hitch at this point:
GPS: Drive 0.5 miles and then enter roundabout.
Wassy: (Who was driving) Wait a minute…did it just say what I think it said? I didn't know there was going to be a roundabout! Ahhhh!!
Then later, as we were entering the roundabout… "Oh no, a roundabout! AHHHHHH!! … Oooh, this is senic … ARRRGHHH!"
We survived to get to the hotel though, where I'm proud to say I had one of the rare moments where I argued a point with somebody. I went to check in to the hotel and the person at the front desk said that we weren't going to be able to get rooms on the same floor. Well…that wasn't going to work out…we reserved the rooms in January and specifically requested connecting rooms if possible and next to each other if not. So after discussing a little bit, It eventually moved to rooms on the same floor to rooms that are right next to each other. Wheee!
We went out exploring after settling into our rooms. First off was my first metro/subway experience which wasn't that bad. The DC Metro system is pretty nice. We had a little problem with directions and we got lost a couple times to start off with, but we eventually found our way to The White House. I was amazed at how close you could actually get to the building, considering all of the security concerns and such. The only thing that was blocked off was Pennsylvania Ave to outside traffic. Otherwise a tourist could walk right up to the black fence and snap a picture.
It should be noted here that we saw our only cherry blossoms of the trip so far, across the street from the white house. The picture I took of them was really, really good, so I'm going to put it in here using the jumbo size option that Vox just added
Ok, after the White House, we ended up walking through the Vietnam War Veterans Memorial. Which, to me, was extremely eerie. There were a TON of names on that wall and although I didn't have a personal connection (that I'm aware of) with anybody who died, it was still chilling seeing all of the names.
After that, we swung past the Lincoln Memorial. When we were at The White House, we remarked that it looked a lot smaller than we thought it would be. Well…the Lincoln Memorial made up for that, as it was a lot bigger than we anticipated.
The reflecting pool wasn't doing much reflecting, unfortunately. I guess it was drained for winter. In any case, the Lincoln Memorial was very cool.
Then we stumbled onto the Korean War Veterans Memorial which I didn't know existed until we were forced down the path by closed sidewalks. It was fairly interesting, although it didn't have the same impact on me that the Vietnam memorial had.
Here's where things started sucking a little bit. It was threatening rain all day and right around 5pm, the skies opened up and we had some pretty heavy (cold) rain and lots of wind, which is really not a good combination when you're walking around a major city. We decided to trek on to the Tidal Basin to see the
Jefferson Memorial, however, by the time we got there, we decided to call it quits without seeing any more of the monument type stuff due to the crappy weather. The lighting in the Jefferson Memorial wasn't the best, so I didn't get too many good pictures of it. Oh well… Then we had the metro ride from HELL. We had to make it from the city into a residential area in the middle of rush hour. I don't like large crowds, and this was about as large as it gets.
We went back to the hotel for about 15-20 minutes, long enough for me to take a shower and change into some dry clothes considering we were soaked to the bone. Dinner that night was seafood at The Dancing Crab in Washington, DC. I must say…I was a little worried about this particular dinner choice since I'm not fond of seafood at all. However, my friends got me to try the salmon which I thought was pretty good. And Wassy, the crab smashing master gave me a little taste of crab meat which was really quite good. Takes too much work to get the meat out.
The dinner went amazingly well, considering the previous days activities, but we were all tired, so we went back to the hotel room and slept.
Today…the Smithsonian!
You can see more pictures of the trip over on my flickr account. Click here!
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