Those are the highlights of our recent trip to Washington DC. Joni wanted to go to a wedding in Roanoke, Virginia and since DC is nearby, we decided to go there on the way back.
It is about a ten hour drive from Ithaca to Roanoke which we split over two days, arriving at the wedding site promptly at 1:30 on Saturday as advised by Joni's friend (the groom) even though the ceremony didn't start until 2:00. After about an hour standing around in the hot Virginia sun -- an hour that I found fairly boring -- we moved on to the wedding reception in an air conditioned room.
We left Roanoke around 5pm to try to visit the Endless Caverns: last tour at 7pm and about 115 miles away. We arrived just in time to go on the tour. Joni was going to get her warmer footwear out of the car when she discovered that the car key was broken in half! We could see the other half of the key in the door. We had no spare key, hence no way to use the car even if we got the doors unlocked.
The helpful man at the Endless Caverns called a locksmith for us. The locksmith was on the road so we couldn't talk to him, but the helpful man said we should go on the tour and he would try to get the locksmith.
So we went into the Endless Caverns. They have mapped out about five miles of the cave system and there is one passage which has been explored out to about twelve hundred feet without reaching the end. Successive explorers have journeyed its length and left a note in a bottle at the farthest point of their journies challenging future explorers to do better.
I've never been inside a decent cave before. Joni tells me that the caves she visited in New Mexico were much better, but Arizona is very far away. The tour was fairly well designed. They had lighting strategically placed around the cave and at one point, to illustrate the effect of it, the guide brought us to the end of an unremarkable passage and turned off the lights for a while. Then she turned on more lights than had been on before and we could see pretty cave formations for hundreds of feet in all directions, including nice reflections in a pool of water.
During the tour, we were informed by intercom that a locksmith was on the way. We only had to wait ten minutes after the tour before he arrived. With a pair of tweezers he deftly extracted half of the key from the lock. With both halves of the key, he went into his van to manufacture a replacement key for us. Joni was really amazed and happy. She remarked that people must be really happy to see the locksmith (unlike her job in the bakery). The locksmith said that he used to work as a health inspector but he quickly realized that people didn't look forward to his visits, so he searched for alternative employment.
We were fortunate that Joni's Volvo doesn't have the high security Volvo locks, however. These locks apparently are flat on the top and bottom and have notches of differing sizes carved into the grooves on the side of the key. I wish I'd asked him how he made the new key. I saw him consult a booklet and mumble something about lengths which leads me to speculate that he looked up the possible notch sizes on Volvo keys and then ground the new key by looking at the old one and measuring the depths of the notches. This process took maybe twenty minutes. We had him make a duplicate key too (which was very quick). And the whole thing only cost $42.
By the time we finally left the caverns, it was dark. As we drove away, Joni noticed that a field nearby was filled with fireflies. I've never seen fireflies before, so we stopped to watch them. Once we started driving again, we could still see them as streaks of light.
On Sunday morning we finally reached the DC area. We found a hotel in Falls Church, a town outside DC and took the metro to the Smithsonian. We went to the National Museum of American History where we saw exciting things like the gowns worn by various first ladies. I liked the exhibit on printing best. It had descriptions of the various printing methods and examples of work which used each technique. The exhibits were not limited to American History.
We went to the National Museum of Air and Space which neither of us found particularly exciting. The best part was the IMAX movie Blue Planet which is good. It has footage of lighting at night as seen from the space shuttle and some nice thunderstorm and hurricane footage.
The next and final day of our trip, we started out by visiting the Washington Monument and the Lincoln Memorial. The Washington Monument is impressive when viewed from a distance of twenty feet. A line is clearly visible on the monument where construction stopped for several years during the Civil War. The resulting structure, finished some thirty years after it was begun, looks nothing like the original plans. (We both think that the monument looks better the way it is than in the plans.)
The Lincoln Memorial is less impressive. The helpful staff denied the rumor that Joni had heard that Lincoln's hands are held in the sign language symbols for Lincoln's two initials. Much of the monument was covered up to protect delicate paintings. Oh well.
Later that day, we split up. Joni went to the The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum which she liked. I went to the Museum of Natural History and checked out the insect zoo and I briefly set foot in the capitol.
We went to Georgetown to eat dinner and selected an Italian restaurant. The waiter there was very entertaining. I ordered an alcoholic drink and we asked the waiter why he didn't card me. I looked like I was 21, he said. He seemed pretty confident about it. Young guys often wear hats in an attempt to make themselves look older, so he said that he always cards people with hats. He mentioned later that Joni was definitely a feminist. She asked him how he knew and he said "I know women and I know that if I called you 'dear' or 'darling' you'd get upset." When we asked him where he was from, he made us guess. He speaks English (with very little accent), Italian, French, German and another language. He agreed that his country was Mediterranean. He said it was a Christian country (though the Encyclopedia doesn't really bear this out) and that there has been war there since 1902. It is one of two countries that puts women on a pedestal -- he is not a chauvinist. Any guesses?
The answer is Lebanon. We didn't get it. The encyclopedia doesn't seem to back up his claims about the place, however.
In the end, we enjoyed this trip less than Florida. We aren't sure why. It seemed to be difficult to find things to do in DC. Because we had to pay for our own lodgings and food all the time, costs were much higher.