Day 3

Day 3 <?xml:namespace prefix = o ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office" />

 

3rd May 2007

 

Woke up around 8.30 ish in our grotty little motel room.  Well grotty it was or may have been, but still up market from the one we had stopped in the night before.  We breakfasted on what we could find in our bags – breakfast bars (Apple and Cinnamon) and over-ripe bananas - they do not respond well to being too close to ice blocks!!).  All the other food we had with us had to be dumped as there was no fridge in this motel room.  Tea without milk – ugh - but still we managed.

 

Today Bob had to work in the morning so we had to be ready for his conference call at 10.00 am, which he took with good grace and was bold and resolute with his client.  At around 11.00 am we popped back to the Macy’s complex – no not for shopping, but to leave the car so that we could get the Metro from <?xml:namespace prefix = st1 ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:smarttags" />Pentagon City to Union Station and from there catch the Duck Tour.   Arriving there at lunch time we braved the vastly over crowded food mall for a burrito, where they got our order wrong and we had one between the two of us.  Well, just as well, given the size.

 

Leaving on the Duck bus at 1.30 am for a 90 minute tour we thought we were going to be the only two aboard, but at the 11th hour five other people joined the trip (a family from Ghana and a lone senior American lady, who was trusted to pay her fare on her return), and off we went around Washington.

 

The tour was comprehensive.  Our major disappointment was the White House.  In comparison to everything else we saw it was tiny and insignificant.  No wonder we hadn’t found it yesterday.  Many of the other buildings were more impressive and indeed some seem to have been modeled on the government buildings on the Mall in London.

 

The Pentagon was just AWESOME; we could not believe how much space it took up.  There was a new memorial just dedicated to the Air Force which was a major stainless steel structure representing the vapour trails of three diverging jet fighters.  Unfortunately we couldn’t get a picture of that.

 

The Botanical Gardens were pretty impressive. Apparently, in it and the Arboretum that surrounds the Capitol, there is at least one of every tree that grows in America.  We had arrived just after the normal Cherry blossom season but this year it peaked on April 1 and was then killed off by a big freeze, so we could only imagine what it would have looked like; but there were many other trees still in flower.  Apparently the normal lifespan of Cherry trees is about 47 years, but the ones in one particular grove in Washington have been there for over a 100 years.  The first Cherry trees to be gifted by Japan were rejected by the local customs officers because they were blighted under the bark but the next year’s crop was clean and allowed to be disembarked and planted.

 

The reason why this is called the Duck Tour is because the vehicle used is an amphibious military vehicle known as a Duck (officially DUKW).   Our Duck was called the Lame Duck and one of the others was called the Sitting Duck.  Halfway through the tour the bus slips into the River Potomac and you get to see Washington from a different angle, before coming back onto land and completing the rest of the bus tour.  Sights passed included  Christopher Columbus Circle at Union Station, the Postal Museum, the Capitol (with the statue of Freedom and her eagles wings on top of the building) and the Memorial to all those Japanese Americans who had been put in US detention camps (because they were supposedly hostile Aliens) during the Second World War.  Then there were various trade union buildings.  The Carpenters Union was interesting due to the fact that there was no wood on the outside, because, after the 1812-14 War, it was decreed that no building in Washington Downtown could be made of wood, because during the war the Brits had set fire to the city, destroying all the wooden buildings.  Also noted were the Mellon Museums of Art and their fountain and The Lincoln Memorial with its 39 pillars representing the 39 states at the time of its being built.  We also saw the Federal Reserve where Alan Greenspan used to take regular lunchtime strolls and say hello to our driver/commentator (who used to be a travel writer).  Einstein’s memorial was covered in people and then we went past the Vietnam War Memorial. We then drove through the park past the Jefferson Memorial to the marina where we joined the water.

 

Visible from nearly every direction was a large obelisk, the Washington Memorial, which was paler at thebottom than for most of its length because the Civil War intervened between the building of the first part and the rest.  At the end of the war, all the pale stone in the quarry had been used up.  They didn’t seem to have the nous to look for somewhere else to obtain matching stone.

 

Out in the river we watched a Cormorant trying to eat a fish he had caught, but it looked like it was speared on its beak, which meant it was in trouble.  We also saw a mother duck and her newly hatched ducklings.  We got a good view of the Pentagon from the water.  We passed under several bridges: two for cars, one for trains, which used to incorporate a swing bridge but, after the control tower caught fire, became inoperable, so it was decided it was not cost-effective to repair it.  This effectively caused Georgetown to die as a port. 

 

Back on land, we continued around Washington seeing various other sites before returning to Union Station.  Back onto the Metro we went back to Pentagon City.  Before liberating the car from the car park we spent an hour in Starbucks catching up on our emails and, yes, having a coffee and scrummy cake, not to mention sandwich and a granola clogged yoghurt.  Heaven help our weights if we carry on like this.  Bob did his email business first and then got bored whilst I was doing mine, even though I am sure he spent more time on the computer than I did.

 

Then it was back into the car and a drive to our next destination of Harper’s Ferry.  This was a lovely scenic drive through the fresh-green-leaved-tree-lined Potomac Valley, once we’d negotiated the hell of Washington’s rush hour, trying to get onto the I270.  As we arrived at Harper’s Ferry, we crossed the Shenandoah, invoking Bob’s appalling impersonation of Paul Robeson singing “Shenandoah, I love your daughter, ‘way, you rolling river..“.  We arrived there around 7.30 pm and booked into yet another fairly grotty motel, run by another Indian of little grace and his wife.  The first room they offered us was so heavy with cigarette smoke that we refused it.  The second was much better, but to shut the door you had to lift it and push it up as the top hinges had pulled away from the door frame.  We then went to the diner for our evening meal – very basic food – I had pork chops and Bob had chicken bits – but his baked beans were better than my green ones, and nothing alcoholic to drink, so we contented ourselves with water, orange juice and coffee.  After which I finished the book I was reading and then went to bed.