Our second April break spent in the D.C. area.   We left Wednesday morning and made it to Greenwich, CT before our first trip to McD’s at some rest stop off 95.  The GW was clogged but beyond that we had a smooth drive all the way to Bethesda.  Cristin had mentioned at some point a restaurant she remembered from Bethesda and I somehow had registered this as being a more fond childhood memory than it was.  Turns out she ate there on two occasions.   At that point I was already determined to go even if the nostalgia was insignificant  so we checked into the hotel and quickly hoofed over to the “Pines of Rome”.  Despite a large and tired awning, the restaurant signage is conspicuously absent, save a 5”x5″ square tile near the front door.  It is probably for the best that it remain a hidden gem.  Inside, there are several rooms dressed in a faded red wallpaper and kitschy scenes of old Italy.  I am certain if you pulled the paintings off the wall they would show the original color of the paper, before several decades of cigarette smoke had performed the requisite chemical alterations.   The girls were nervously excited about a restaurant with no kids menu and we ordered them a plate of spaghetti with red sauce.  Cristin and I both had the carbonara which is one of my favorite dishes and should always be made in its pure northern Italian form consisting only of spaghetti, olive oil, pancetta, with egg cooked carefully over the heat of the pasta.   I was pleased to hear the waiter acknowledge that their dish was made in this manner instead of with an alfredo sauce or perhaps worst of all combined with some other ingredients such as the horrifying lobster carbonara found in the “authentic” restaurants of Boston’s north end.  It turned out to be marginally acceptable.  The meat was some very strange thick cut, and quite frankly I had trouble placing what animal it was sourced from.  We wandered back the hotel where the girls took in some Disney Junior and hit the hay.  Thursday we walked to the subway and bought metro cards to go to the zoo.  I had been there once before decades ago and remembered being unimpressed but this trip changed my mind.  The animal habitats are quite considerable, for a zoo.  The “big cats” have an area to roam that is almost 0.001% of the 100 square miles of territory they keep in the wild, nearly 3x what you might find at any other zoo!  Cristin noted that the habitat expansions meant a lot of species had disappeared including “Happy” the Hippo.  She determined later from internet sleuthing that he had been transferred to Milwaukee where the keepers were completely ill prepared for his arrival, prompting a last minute $150K overhaul of his paddock.  

Cristin has started some tradition where the girls can pick out a “souvenir” on each trip.  Phoebe had been discussing this for a solid week prior to departures, trying to understand what opportunities she would have.   I would venture to say this caused some undue anxiety because there were items at the zoo gift shop she desired but she was aware this meant passing up three other future opportunities.  Ellie could give a damn about future opportunities and had picked out some cheetah stuffy roughly 26 seconds after entering the store.  It wasn’t until we reached the fourth and final gift shop on the last day of the trip that Phoebe found her selection which was a cute harbor seal.  Obviously the “no stuffies” rule is long gone.   Stuffies consume around 40% of the surface area of Phoebe’s bed, and this is when they are tightly packed.  When she chooses to arrange them, it is closer to 70%.   We left the zoo with sufficient time to hit the hotel pool before going to dinner at Lizzie’s house.  The hotel pool was comically small but a step up from the prior year where we stayed in the city and there was no pool at all, there was in fact only a lot of people that needed to be tipped for unnecessary activities.  At Lizzie’s, the five kids played on the jungle gym that is literally next door to her house while the ladies sat and talked, mostly about schools.  The private “day school”  scene is completely unfamiliar to me but sometimes comes up in the context of Cristin discussing the benefits of uniforms.  Never mind that research has failed to find any correlation between uniforms and academic achievement or any other metric such as school safety.  I think she mainly tries to imply it reduces cliqueing but that may be a little hypocritical given the total dependency of your status on what school you attend in the first place.   Also, our girls are not wanting for outfits so if Cristin pulls the “its better with uniforms” card out when the girls are fighting over some pair of shoes 10 years from now, I might have to pull out a photo of the girls’ closets circa 2017 to discuss the true origin of the problem.  Lizzie served pizza and chicken fingers and the other husbands were conspicuously absent, even going so far as to be golfing somehow in the middle of a spring thunderstorm.   We hit the hay at a reasonable hour and woke up Friday for the drive to the Udar-Hazy Air & Space museum out near Dulles.  This place is a must see for anyone interested in flight.  They have an SR71, a Concorde, a space shuttle (Discovery), a B707, an F35, and a B29 which happens to be the Enola Gay.  The fact is that military technology drove a lot of advances in flight so much of the museum is made of machines designed to kill, or in the case of the SR71, to spy.  I love these world war and cold war relics as much as anyone but there is something truly weighty about the Enola Gay which earned fame by dropping the first wartime atomic bomb, Little Man, on a completely unsuspecting Japanese civilian population, killing 100,000 people within the hour and another 100,00 over the next month.  The world has become so complacent about these weapons but I have found the same unease I carried with me in my youth when the F105s from Otis Air Base on the Cape would frequently emit sonic booms through town has returned with our new President.  I frankly am uncomfortable with the idea that Putin and Trump have the complete power to launch a nuclear strike.  Currently, the total yield of weapons that can be launched at a moment’s notice is 70,000 times greater than Little Man.  The same man that cannot take criticism from a nobody on Twitter is in complete control of half and there is no such thing as anyone launching half their nuclear arsenal.  Wonderful.   Despite being absent from the area for 20 years, Cristin had a sixth sense about the traffic and ushered us out of there at 3:00 to “beat the rush”.   I think everybody in the D.C. area shared that sixth sense.  What followed was three hours to drive exactly 60 miles which, and let me do the math for you, is an average speed of 20mph.  It seemed to be a problem of general volume but there were some fender benders and in particular a huge bottleneck due to the the lack of Potomac crossings, the primary one being the bridge formerly known as Cabin John bridge.  I mentioned my frustration to Cristin about the lack of a second beltway, the equivalent of our 495 and after googling, saw there has been a lot of discussion about a second bridge or an expansion of the existing one.  The problem is that the Potomac separates the two states of Maryland and Virginia, and in a weird twist of geography, Maryland owns both banks.  The Virginia governor refuses to front any money for a bridge that exists entirely within the state of Maryland.  This plan, along with the proposed circumferential light rail “purple line” train  connecting Bethesda to U of M are going nowhere fast.   And so, despite a modern Metro system, people in D.C. spend a lot of time in their cars.  We arrived at the Baltimore hotel which was right on the waterfront.  Despite Baltimore’s reputation, which for me is gained from watching “The Wire”, the harbor front area is really nice, arguably the best harborfront area of any city I have been to, including San Diego and San Francisco.  Like Boston, the original piers dating back three hundred years are still very evident but now host concert venues and restaurants and museums and, our destination on the last day, the National Aquarium.  Now, don’t let the name fool you.  This place is not really part of the federal museum system with free admittance.   In fact, it is the opposite of free.  I believe we dropped $140 for the four of us to get jam packed like cattle into the building.  It is an impressive facility but the crowds really were too much and the experience was sub par.  We ate out in the Italian district at “Amicci’s” on the last night and the girls had yet another plate of spaghetti.  Cristin then proceeded to order a cannoli and tiramisu.  Phoebe ate the latter and Ellie managed to extract just the individual chocolate chips from the filling of the former.   We tried to leave early on the last day to beat the traffic but Ellie was up late coughing, in fact coughing so much she barfed in her bed and I am now realizing we never conveyed that fact to the hotel staff.  Oh well.  We rolled out straight into one traffic mess after another.  The entire section from the GW to New Haven is always snarled up.  I had lost patience and Cristin did most of the driving while the girls watched movies in the backseat.  We crawled from lunch at the Vince Lombardi rest stop in northern NJ all the way through Connecticut.  We had planned on stopping towards the Rhode Island border for ice cream but were feeling close at this point so we pushed on.  Somewhere near the Braga Bridge, Phoebe, who probably has the strongest bladder of the 4 of us, announced she had to go and after putting on a hysterical display we ended up stopping in Dartmouth MA, arriving in a bathroom at just around the same moment we would have pulled in our own driveway had we continued on.   Car trip delays are part of having children so it is hard to get too upset.  On a trip to New Hampshire a few years back we spent hours packing up the car and left the house and ended up getting dinner at a restaurant in Wareham, roughly 8 minutes from the house.  Overall it was a great D.C. area vacation and fun to catch up with some of Cristin’s old crew.