Photos
January 17, 2014
We were up about 8am and had a very hearty breakfast.
Embassy Suites does a good job and we made breakfast and lunch of it! We went back up and brushed our teeth, packed and checked out. We put our bags in the trunk of the car and then came up the elevator back through the atrium and out into the cold for the long walk to the Metro station at
Dupont Circle.
We hadn't done any homework and didn't find buying
Metro tickets as intuitive as we had remembered it being before. Also prices had gone way up! We ended up wasting about $1.60 each on Metro tickets. That was annoying. Also, we followed the directions of the woman at the Embassy Suites desk and walked about 45 minutes instead of the 20 minutes we remembered and expected. This is what comes of winging it! Or having all your prep work stored on the Internet when there is none available to you or it is too slow or you have the wrong device, etc. Anyway.
The
National Gallery of Art is free! It opens at 10am. So, we were in no hurry anyway. I believe the Metro rides cost us about $2.60 or $2.80 pp each way. We arrived and departed at 2 different stations near the Mall. We got there shortly after it opened and saw our last
4 Vermeers of the trip. We quickly went through the Impressionists after that, had a look at the Dying Gaul on loan from Rome and left.
We walked over to have a look at the Capitol and stumbled on the
National Law Enforcement Memorial on the way to the closest Metro station. We rode the Metro back to Dupont Circle arriving just as the giant up escalator broke. We squeezed into the tiny elevator with the mob and started our chilly walk back to the car.
I won't bore you with the nightmare of the GPS's Miss Bossypants latest misdirection disaster, but we circled downtown DC/Georgetown aimlessly for over an hour before finally finding our way out and across the river headed for I-95 south. This is what comes of not using maps! There was no good reason for it. Clay is accepting the blame for this catastrophe, but I put it squarely on Miss Bossypants.
As we headed down the Interstate, Clay asked me to use
Road Ninja to find somewhere to eat. I blame slow Internet on his smartphone (or else it was operator error!), but I couldn't find anything useful on there. Realizing finally that our speed was greater than that of the flow of information (which is usually a problem in situations like this!), Clay asked me to just find a restaurant in Rocky Mount where we would change highways. The first place I brought up had Philly Cheesesteak on the menu and I was in! It was
Highway Diner. I keyed the address into the GPS and although I could see it was one exit back from I-95 on 64, Miss Bossypants got us off the Interstate early and drove us through the country side aimlessly to get there. Another GPS fail as far as I am concerned. I enjoyed another cheesesteak (this time with American cheese, but still good!) and Clay had fried fish. We both stuffed ourselves with huge portions and then pigged out by sharing an enormous slice of Red Velvet Cake. Delicious and an excellent stop. We filled up the gas tank and headed for home. We got back a little before 5pm.
It was a whirlwind tour of East Coast Vermeers and an excellent road trip.
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