Edit: The picture are now available at http://pictures.angrybrownguy.com.
So we got into the hotel Friday night after a not so bad drive filled with a small portion of rain where the visibility was probably negative at a point. We got here around midnight last night and didn’t do much except lounge around the room. This morning I did not see us getting up at 9 am but somehow we did and were out an hour or so later. We got to Washington DC about 11 and surprising could not find a single Dunkin Donuts here in Maryland or in DC. Go figure, we must have searched for anywhere from half an hour to an hour along our route. On the other hand, we did find a Bank of America ATM machine that lets us withdraw money in multiples of $10. I have never seen that anywhere!
We missed a majority of the Cherry Blossom Festival by the time we got there but the caught the ending starting with a Garfield float followed by some Sesame Street characters… about how that is related to Japanese culture and Cherry Blossoms… don’t ask me. That was followed with several hours of Japanese Street Festival. That went much better than I had orginally thought. There were lots of people dressed up in traditional Japanese attire and there were certainly plenty were dressed just ridiculously. There were plenty of good things to see from the various flowers and plants from Japan to several sculptures that people were carving of animals to people hosting mini demonstrations of martial arts or showing off their creativity.
After that, we continued hunting for actual Cherry Blossoms without much success. This eventually led us right in the middle of the Washington Monument and The Capitol. Took a couple of pictures there, asked a Park Ranger about where we could find them but eventually ended up the Air and Space Museum. I hadn’t been there in quite a while, but they sure have changed the place up a bit. It looks pretty good but I would have liked to see more space stuff and less about just air (planes). Anyways that went pretty well, ended up seeing an IMAX production about The Space Station narrated by none other than Tom Cruise. It was really cool to see them talk about their preparation and challenges/benefits of being in space and doing space walks and all that good stuff.
Finally after about 8 hours of being in the District of Columbia, we finally found a Cherry Blossom tree. It was by the Potomac where we saw the Thomas Jefferson Memorial on the other side. It was pretty good to finally just sit down in the grass after about 8+ hours walking during the day where it would rain on and off and where would get really hot for a short stretch. My pedometer on my phone said I took 23,904 steps today (equivalent of 11.9 miles, also resulting in 1030.4 kCal burned).
On a side note, the Metro system is completely awesome compared to the PATH we have in the New York/New Jersey area. The stations are so much cleaner, the train lines although seem a little awkward get the job done and even have carpets.The fare system is pretty fair too, as it depends on the further you go, the more you pay per ride – helped us on the way to DC because we decided to randomly skip our transfer and just walk out of the station and walk the rest of the way.
The rest of the guys have fallen a sleep here, and our rooms aren’t as bad as I thought it would be. I’ll catch a glimpse of the Masters’ highlights on Sports Center that is starting now and probably head to bed soon. Heading back to Jersey tomorrow.