McDonalds Threepeat

We have managed to have work emergencies cancel 50% of our vacations so we decided to preplan a getaway for the April school break so it would at least be on the books.  A quick look at airline tickets put Florida out of the running.  We then decided to find the warmest place within reach of the automobile and came up with Washington, D.C.    We were pretty fortunate on the break to first see Aunt Sarah run the Boston Marathon and then have a fun dinner with her and Uncle Jon.  We ended up leaving Wednesday in the morning around 9 and did not arrive at the hotel until 12 hours later.   The girls took in some portable TV time and I stared at google maps routing us around various traffic jams. Rt 95 in the northeast corridor is probably consistently the worst long stretch of highway in the U.S. so we weren’t completely surprised by the near factor of two it required over a kids-free no traffic time.

We checked into the hotel which involved tipping three or four people for doing nothing extraordinary,  goodie bags for the girls containing a square meter of tissue paper wrapped around a free map and a 25 cent box of four crayons, and rooms that could have been in any hotel in any location in the free world.  Downtown hotels continue to be a scam.  Thursday we took the metro towards the Mall after two Ph.D.’s spent 10 minutes trying to understand the payment system which is only slightly less convoluted than the “Charlie Card / Charlie Ticket” system that was the outcome of the great minds of the MBTA.  On the subway, Cristin looked at the girls on their seats and noted it was like country mouse city mouse which was funny, especially since none of us are really city mice.

We visited the air and space museum which had a great 3D movie and then we ran into our neighbor on the steps of the Lincoln memorial.   The girls were wearing down so I bought them some ice cream and we walked down the edge of the wading pool to the Vietnam and WW2 memorials.  The latter is new since my last trip to D.C. and I remember the discussion about it during the 1990s when the millions of veterans of the war were reaching life expectancy and disappearing without having something in the nation’s capital to honor of their service.   Those who did pass before it was built should be thankful they missed it.  Compared with the starkly powerful Vietnam memorial, It is ostentatious and gaudy and what I might expect the Nazi Party to put there had Germany managed to win the war.   Friday was rainy and we returned to the mall to see the museum of natural history.  Although there was a lot of confusion about the hominid skull collection, the ladies loved the museum, particularly the dinosaur fossils (actually casts) and the tarantula eating a cricket demonstration.  We hit the Cronin’s for a fun dinner with Cristin’s old crew and then caught some shut eye in preparation for the journey home.    In my youth, my parents always pre-packed the car with seats folded down and two slots for kids to sleep and room for a dog.   They tossed us in at the break of dawn and we would arrive at the destination by lunch.    Apparently Poppi used this same approach.  Somehow, and I suspect this might be due to the fact that Cristin works regularly to 1 a.m.,  we tend to leave around the break of dawn in Anchorage.   Since we were returning on a Saturday I did not expect any major traffic jams but Connecticut is never one to disappoint and we found ourselves weaving between 95 and the Mystic and eventually stopping at some random semi-derelict Tex-Mex place for a surprisingly good dinner.   It was a solid, memorable vacation and despite the excessive car time I was happy to have avoided air travel.