A Long Day's Night

After driving for what seemed like three and a half days, and nearly leaving the transmission somewhere in Ohio (I still don't do well with stick shifts...), we arrived in Alexandria, VA around 5:00. Since our room was provided by the Fairfield Resorts as a gift for listening to a timeshare presentation on our last big trip, we had to check in with them and resist being convinced to go to another presentation (read: high-pressure sales opportunity) in exchange for more freebies. After a short time where we said we might attend the following evening's presentation, we got our hotel information and directions and headed uptown to check in. We were at the Holiday Inn & Suites in Alexandria, and our room was very nice. I don't know what our original room would have been like - they had a king-size reserved for us, but it was a smoking room, so we opted for the non-smoking, two double room instead. The beds were very comfortable, and everyone at the hotel was extremely helpful and friendly. After getting our stuff to the room, we planned to go into Washington to see some of the monuments at night. When we inquired at the desk for the nearest Metro station, we were informed that the hotel had a shuttle that would drop us at Ronald Reagan National Airport, where we could catch the Metro into DC proper. Since we thought that sounded like a plan, away we went. The Metro ride was fairly short (about 15 minutes), and after disembarking at the Smithsonian stop (our home sweet home for three days), we were on our way.


The first thing I learned about Washington is that even though everything is relatively
close to everything else, it's still quite a hike. We started at the Washington Monument (the first picture), and made our way around it to the World War II memorial (the fountains were beautiful) and the Lincoln Memorial (good ol' Abe down there). The walk down the Mall to the Washington Monument wasn't too bad, and the WWII memorial is pretty close to it, but between the WWII memorial and the Lincoln Memorial is the reflecting pool (immortalized in Forrest Gump), which is very nearly half a mile long. All together, I think we must have walked about four miles that night. By the time we got back to the hotel, we were tired and hungry. We scrambled around looking for someplace to eat dinner, and ended up at a restaurant around the corner called Stardust. We ate our dinners and went back to the hotel and crashed.