18 January, 2008 | Leave a Comment

After my whirlwind visit to NYC, I Amtrak’d it down to DC.  [There's the phallic Washington Monument shrouded in fog.]  I must say that Amtrak is nicer than that horrific Eurostar. I arrived at the wondrous Union Station:

I went to DC because that is where I planned to meet my parents. They still live in The Place That Cannot Be Named, but we planned to spend the holidays in North Carolina. They know how much I hate flying, so instead of making me catch a flight from NYC during the Christmas rush, we decided to meet in DC and then drive to NC. Yes, I am a diva. What else is new?

We had very little time in DC, but drove around to see the Capitol and other sights:

 

The capital was eerily deserted; all the government employees had left for the holidays, apparently. The wide boulevards were a marvel. After living in Europe, I’ve become used to old winding streets. In comparison, the streets in DC seemed to be acres wide. I took photos of the White House and Capitol Christmas trees, which were already posted here. [On our way out of town, the city was fogged in, which is when I took the photo at the top.]

My dad wanted to stop at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum, which I thought would be snooze-o-rama:

Airplanes and rockets and junk like that - a nerd’s paradise. However, by a stroke of luck, many of the major exhibits from the other Smithsonian were on display in the museum, including Kermit the Frog, Lincoln’s top hat, plus suffragist artifacts:

Babe Ruth’s homerun ball:

And Dorothy’s ruby slippers:

So the museum visit wasn’t a complete waste of time!

That night my parents took me out for a birthday dinner that included lobster, which was very enjoyable until my dad pointed out that it had probably been alive until an hour before we arrived at the restaurant:

We also had cornbread in a skillet:

This was the first meal I’d eaten with my parents in more than a year and I had forgotten how they are always humiliated by my high-maintenance ordering demands in restaurants, such as asking for certain ingredients to be left out and for other things to come “on the side.” In this case I’m not being diva, there are just things I can’t eat. In North Carolina, we went to an Italian restaurant and I ordered chicken parmigiana with no cheese and with tomato sauce on the side. It took hours for them to recover from the shame of that.

In the evening, a lovely friend of mine who lives in DC met me at the hotel bar for two hours. I’m the kind of person who orders herbal tea in a bar. I enjoyed my tea and conversation with A-, who I chat with nearly everyday on email but hadn’t seen in ages. [A-, when are you coming to London?!]

The next morning my parents made me get up bright and early and we hit the Interstate along with millions of other people. We had about an 8-hour drive ahead of us, which started off in the rain and fog on I-95 and ended in sunshine:

The next and last stop, the final frontier: North Carolina.

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