1. A parking place
Our original plan was to forego a car, but the last minute plan to have dinner with Ben in Chinatown late on Saturday evening made our plan of using buses and Metro untenable, at least for that day.
So we had a rental car on the first two days of our trip, an unexpected luxury. And this turned out to be a godsend on the first day, since we were dodging severe thunderstorms all afternoon and evening. And on the second day, it gave us an easy way to commute into DC.
As it turned out, we had a place to park. Melissa and Carlyle, friends from years ago, graciously offered to share their driveway. And living as they do a short walk from a metro stop, getting into the city was a breeze (except of course we had to navigate our way in from suburban Virginia: a pleasure we had hoped to avoid by using mass transit).
Still, a free parking place mere blocks from the metro? Oh my. Thank you indeed, Melissa and Carlyle.
We parked in front of their house, knocked on the door to let them know we were there, walked to the Pentagon City metro and rode into the city.
2. Olfactory memories
Down underground, for a brief moment it was 1981.
I mean really. That was 30 years ago almost to the day. And it’s not like I haven’t been back to DC since. But something characteristic in the smell of the Metro stations took me back.
There I was feeling as if I was catching the metro with my summer roommate John and 13 other engineering students as we worked our way around town as summer interns in the Washington Internships for Students of Engineering. I had flashbacks of standing in the metro at rush hour as all the suits came and went, of savoring the Washington Post every day, of learning about The MacNeil-Lehrer Report and Washington Week in Review, of throwing frisbees on the mall where years later the Vietnam Memorial would be built, of looking out the window of our dorm room at GWU onto the street below, of the hot mugginess of Foggy Bottom, of evening walks to Georgetown, of a weekend road trip to Massachusetts and trying to find a parking place in Central Park just to say we were there as we passed thru.
I mean really. All that came washing back from 30 years ago. It came in a flash as we got off at the Smithsonian metro stop, and then it was gone.
And then we started our little vacation in DC.