After reacquainting Charlotte with her home town, and having experienced it’s wonders for a couple of well lubricated days, it’s time to head north.
Time is quickly running out – I only have 14 days left before my visa runs out and too much to see and do.
Our destination is Washington, DC, usually around a 2 hour drive, extended to 3 and a bit via the more interesting backroads.
After reading about DC’s traffic and parking issues, I’ve decided to drive to a station on the outskirts of town with plenty of parking and catch the metro into DC itself. Unfortunately Charlotte and I dawdle a little bit and only get to DC in the late afternoon, a little late to do much exploring, except in the local area.
I don’t realise it but Washington is a maze of highway loops, overpasses and exits, so the idea of just tootling around quickly becomes an endless nightmare of hops from one freeway to another, before I lose all sense of direction, and haven’t seen a thing. I finally manage to take an off ramp that doesn’t lead to yet another freeway and pull over.
I have no idea where I’ve ended up, so I fire up the Garmin and determine that I’ve travelled about 10 miles in the car, but ended up less than a mile from where I started. The metro idea seems sounder and sounder.
I have a walking tour of the national mall booked for the morrow at 2 pm, meaning I have to catch to train by about 12.45 to be safe, so I have tonight and the morning free.
I need dinner so the local brewhouse it is – this time it’s Fair Winds Brewing, about a 5 min drive from where I am. It’s a typical craft brewery, but one that actively includes children , with the proper accompaniment (No, not of the musical kind). The food truck for the day is a Gourmet Hot Dog stand, so I grab an offering and a beer and relax.
I meet a few people, including another ex Air Force guy, Ken, who it turns out has been to Australia in his days of training pilots. He’s very complimentary of our armed forces, calling them the best in the world and we happily chat away for a couple of hours before we drink up and go our separate ways.
By this time it’s dark, and the friendly brewers don’t mind me overnighting on their lot (which is in an industrial area), so I grab a small growler, settle in for a little research, some catchup tv and an early start the next day.
The next morning, I have decided that I want to go and see the CIA building at Langley. I’ve got the address, punch it in to the Garmin, and I’m happily led down streets (not freeways) to my destination. I’m sure I had heard somewhere that you could do a tour of the place, but clearly I haven’t done my research properly, (well more truthfully not at all) as I’m entirely wrong. It’s a restricted site, no admittance, and as I backtrack from 2 mistaken attempts to enter I wonder if someone is watching me. When I say backtrack I mean get 20m down an entry ramp, see the huge amount of warning signs and turn around. I’m not silly enough to get all the way to a guard house.
I pull over a little later, pull up the CIA site on my phone and discover the only tour you can do is a virtual online tour! DOH! Apparently you one could once upon a time tour the FBI building, but that all stopped after Sep 11.
There’s not much else to see where I am and I’ve driven a few miles from my prepared station, so I turn around and hike it back. Of course I could look for another station to leave from, but Franconia-Springfield has ample parking, no height restriction preventing Charlotte from entering (which is frequently the case), so I decide to stick with the original place.
Eventually we make it there, Charlotte is safely parked in the free on weekends lot and I’m decrypting the metro pass and fares information at the station. Finally I’m on the train and om my way into DC.
There is too much to add here from the walking tour, so I’ll expand on that in a later post
