I must be seriously, seriously twisted. How much do I love thee...dear reader? Enough to take NOTES on my vacation. Its not enough for me to merely return home and write a thoughtful column on what happened during my vacation. NOOO! I have to purchase a notebook while I'm there and keep a daily log of the weird shit that happened each and every day. All this dedication and I am not receiving a dime!!! (Ahem, feel free to make donations to: Jeffrey Bowdren)
And we are off to Washington D.C. and surrounding areas!!
My wife. I love her...but....she is the world's most anal retentive person when it comes to anything related to time. If the plane is leaving 12:30pm and the airline "suggests" you arrive a couple of hours early, my wife wants to be there by 10:15am.
Me? I'm totally happy to stroll my big ass down the tarmac at 12:10pm, but that's just me. So I go in to work and put in a couple of hours at work and we head to the airport after parking in the "longterm" parking lot. We parked there because the approximate fare at the Ft Lauderdale Airport lot is around $50 a day. Okay, I exaggerate, but trust me, one day its going to cost that much and you'll look back and remember my sarcasm. So we get on the flight, and I am totally hooked up in the fact that there is no one sitting next to me and I have an aisle seat! I'm ready for a couple of hours of airtime, no hassles and a great start to the vacation. And then I saw him. The little monster that sat right in front of Kim and the kids. He was sitting next to his sister and mother and his father was two rows behind him. So the whole flight he would look over his seat and yell (over Kim) "Dad! Hey Dad!" and it was always something useless...like Dad, do you want some of my fritos or something like that. Really stupid shit. And the mother, well apparently she took a vicodin before the flight because we don't hear a peep out of her the whole flight, during which little Eddie Freakin Munster is jumping up and down in his chair and dropping crap on the floor, whereupon he would take far too much time to go underneath his tray and retrieve whatever he had dropped (undoubtably purposely...but I digress). When we finally arrived in D.C., I praised Kim on her otherworldly patience, telling her in no uncertain terms that if the little bastard had been in front of me I would've hauled off and smacked him into the middle of next week.
So we're staying at the Embassy Suites in Crystal City, Virginia, which is right across the Potomac River from the capital for you geography buffs....and the hotel is, ya know, decent without being fantabulous---although the free cocktail every night is an attractive offer--until I saw they were serving like Smirnoff as their well brand of vodka. Sheeeet. Ya can't even spring for the good stuff? No Grey Goose? No Stoli Gold? No Ketel One?
So since we arrived early on the first day, we decide to go over and check out Arlington National Cemetary. We go to catch the Metro, which is the subway system that serves the D.C. & surrounding areas. Really amazing system. Totally clean and efficient, even if you do have at least one escalator at every exit that doesn't work. The damn thing is not just underground....it is WAAAAAAAY underground. I mean, as in Batman's cave-like underground. I kept figuring that we would eventually run into bats. So we're heading to the Metro...and the stop closest to our hotel is....underneath another hotel. Well, actually its underneath the mall that's underneath the hotel. No shit! Underneath the Marriott is a whole friggin mall and if you go beneath that....its the subway! So Arlington is like the 3rd stop from our motel, and its the only one that is above ground. Well the subway comes out from beneath the ground, and all of a sudden I feel like I'm in Sonny Corleone's car at the turnpike exit cuz it sounds like the Metro train I'm on is getting shot at! We had come out in the middle of the worst hailstorm I had ever seen! Truly an amazing site. I betcha a few insurance companies got phone calls that afternoon. So we get off the train around downtown D.C. and we're sorta wandering around, and I realize that we're on Pennsylvannia Ave, where ole G.W. lives! So naturally I assume he wants a photo op with me and begin making my way over there. Of course, when I say that what I really mean to say is that I make my way around all the God forsaken construction that surrounds the White House grounds, which is not to be confused with all the security that surrounds the White House grounds. Let me tell you something, if 9/11 didn't make you want to whip some Al Qaida ass, try go to Washington D.C. on a vacation and getting inconvienced by all the security those sons of bitches caused to go up. While I was in D.C., I overheard someone remark that Al Qaida is probably financed by all the security companies making a fortune guarding everything around the nation's capital. Anyway, enough ranting. Back to G.W.'s house. So its impressive and all, although not as nice as 6 years ago, when you could go up to the fence and get a better photo op. Now you stand like a mile away. Not that I don't understand, its just a real pain. The real amazing part of the visit to the White House? The squirrels. No wait, I'm not kidding. You should see the damn things that are running around the greater White House grounds. They look like small dogs! Obviously the tourists feed the little rodents well. I betcha within the squirrel world there's a real competition to see who gets the White House.
That night we ate Tex-Mex at a place called San Antonio's, which wasn't bad and wasn't the last time we ate Tex-Mex during the vacation. The waiter tried to screw me out of a bowl of chili---but the salsa was top notch.
End of Day # 1
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