Our home base while in the DC area for several days was Cherry Hill Park, an enormous RV park near College Park, Maryland. After a successful RV sanitation mission in the morning, we headed off for the city. Cherry Hill was very convenient for this since the Metro bus came right into a bus stop inside the campground. The bus shuttled us to the Metro train station and we took the green line inbound. The girls really enjoyed riding the train and following the different station stops on the colored map.
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| DC Metro map |
Our first mission of the day took us to the U Street metro stop where we made our way to Ben's Chili Bowl to try some of their famous "chili half smokes" for lunch. To the casual observer, these looked like big charred hot dogs, but hot damn these things were as good as advertised. The chili was spicy and "made our dogs bite." We also enjoyed the show put on by the manager as he sang and danced along with the disco and funk music recordings. The photo on the wall of Barak Obama snarfing a chili half smoke while wearing a suit was outstanding.
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| Worth the wait |
How did we find this excellent restaurant, you ask? We searched in our travel bible: 500 Things You Should Eat Before It's Too Late. Combined with Rachelle's new Urbanspoon app for her iPhone and a few other books that we bought for the trip, obesity has never been easier to maintain.
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| Dude, if you're eating this stuff, it's already too late... |
While we were waiting in line for the restaurant, Amaya's molar fell out. Between Keiko and Amaya, this is the fourth molar to fall out in the last three weeks. I'm not sure that the Tooth Fairy knows how to find her while we're on this trip, but I'm sure Amaya will shake her down somehow.
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| Another hole in the head |
We hopped back on the Green line and took the train in to National Archives stop. A few steps later we were dipping our feet in the fountain on the grounds of the National Gallery of Art. It was 95+ °F in the shade and this felt good. I found it amusing that "dipping" feet was permitted, but any wading out into the fountain elicited a shrill whistle blast from the security guards. We had talked about attending some of the events at the Smithsonian Folk Festival that was taking place along the Mall, but it was so hot that we decided instead to visit the National Museum of the American Indian. Since the girls have been studying a lot about Native Americans in school, they were reasonably interested in the exhibits. The exhibit called "Contact" explained that the diseases introduced by the Westerners resulted in the single largest human death toll in history. It also said that, while tragic, this mass wipeout of humankind was a biological inevitability; one world had evolved in the presence of the diseases and the other had no defense—and it was just a matter of time before the two biosystems collided. I'll be interested to talk to my friends in the biology department about the "what ifs" here.
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| A display in the American Indian Museum |
The museum closed at 5:30 and we had a choice to make about whether we would stay in town for the fireworks show (around 9:00) or head back to the campground before the crowds descended upon the Mall. Thousands of people had already taken up residence on the West lawn of the Capital for "A Capitol Fourth" concert. I was keen on going to that, too, but it was still scorching hot outside and no one else showed any interest. Instead, we grabbed some sandwiches and set up camp under the shade of some trees to wait for the fireworks.
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| Waiting... |
The Mall filled up and we were treated to a 20-minute World-class fireworks display. It was a slight bummer that the wind was light and blowing toward us so the smoke obscured some of the view, but the backdrop of fireworks with the Washington Monument was a sight to behold. Here's the grand finale:
The instant the fireworks ended there was a mass exodus from the Mall. We filed toward the Metro station. The bottleneck was the escalator down into the train station. Fortunately there were guards there stopping the line from time to time. It was pretty intense, but it was clear that they were trying to fill each train car as full and fast as they could to get it out of the station as quickly as possible. It was really pretty amazing how easily we got out of there and I was proud of how well behaved the girls were during this "evacuation exercise." Our campground had a special shuttle bus running from the train station, so we were home by 10:30. Another full day of adventure!
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