Abbie's Real Life Blog

Context!

I finished my trip reports from the trip Out West yesterday and cleaned up the formatting this morning, but I still owe you this, a description of my trip to DC over the weekend.  Maybe you don’t care.  I don’t care if you don’t care.  I write these so that I can remember later how the trip went.

It went well!  I had a good time.

I left on Friday, June 25, on a shuttle bus that runs between Columbia and the airport in Kansas City.  You can take a similar shuttle to St. Louis if you’d rather fly from there, but I like to fly Midwest Airlines to DC.  It has a direct flight to Reagan National Airport, which has a Metro stop, which makes it easy to get into and out of the city.  My boss and I took the same shuttle and same flight, but we stayed at different hotels.

My hotel was the posh and historic Mayflower, located on Connecticut Avenue.  I used to walk by it all the time when I lived in DC, so when I had the chance to stay here (at a comparative rate to the other conference hotels, and cheaper than the place where my boss stayed), I thought it would be pretty cool to experience that side of it.  And it is a nice hotel.  My room faced Connecticut Avenue, but it wasn’t much of a view.  The room itself was nice, but the wi-fi was expensive.  I only really took advantage of one amenity- the mail slot in the elevator lobby of my floor, through which I could drop postcards and watch them fall through the glass shute to the mail box on the first floor.  I LOVED this.  I tend to send postcards as I travel, and there is a slot like this in the movie Miracle on 34th Street, and I went out of my way to get stamps so I could mail things through this slot.  It was very exciting.

We arrived late on Friday afternoon, too late to get to the conference center and check in for the conference.  Oh well.  I had made tentative plans to have dinner with Tracy (who was in town for the weekend), Tracy’s parents, Tracy’s sister, her sister’s wife, and their baby, but there were last minute cancellations.  Tracy and her sister and sister’s family came down and met me at my hotel, and we all walked over to eat dinner at Malaysia Kopitiam, a restaurant on M Street that has a nice selection of vegetarian items, including vegetarian duck and goose.  I tried the veggie goose, and it was great.  Yay!  The variety of vegetarian food on the East Coast is amazing.  After dinner, we walked up to Dupont Circle and around for a little while.  This was my first time meeting Tracy’s sister’s baby, who is five months old.  He was pretty cute, of course, and loved being in the middle of all the people and traffic in Dupont Circle on a summery Friday night.  He was enthralled.

We said good-bye fairly early, and I walked back down to my hotel as they took the Metro home to Rockville, Maryland.

I had plans all the next day at the American Library Association conference, which was held at the DC Convention Center.  My hotel is a good distance from the convention center, but I decided to walk anyway instead of taking the Metro or one of the hired shuttle buses that are routed around to the various conference hotels.  It was a nice walk but hot as blazes.  Not humid, just hot.  I wore a lot of layers to avoid freeze-out since everything indoors was air conditioned to the point of freezing.

It was a reasonable conference day.  We had a lot of vendor meetings scheduled, plus breakfast and lunch at hotels in big ballrooms where the meal is catered in exchange for viewing a presentation by a vendor on new products or new information about products we already have.  I like to go to those because it’s fun to chat with other people at the table beforehand.  For dinner, one of our vendors took us to dinner at a restaurant in Chinatown, Zengo.  It didn’t have a lot of vegetarian options, but the ones they had were wonderful and I will give extra points for very delicious tofu cheesecake.  That’s hard to pull off.

After that, I was glad to get on the Metro and head to the hotel.  The Metro was full of Ghana soccer fans, excited after the big win against the US soccer team in the World Cup.  The game had been televised on screens throughout the conference center earlier in the day, but it isn’t really something that interests me.  Glad that it excites other people, and I thought it was cool (in a worldly city sort of way) that there were proud fans of other countries’ teams attending festivities for the games in the city.

I was thrilled to discover that we had the morning off on Sunday.  I try to fill up mid-afternoons first, and was under the impression that I’d filled up our Sunday, but when we looked at our schedule, we discovered we weren’t due anywhere until early afternoon.  Woot!  I called Tracy and we all made another plan to get brunch at Soul Vegetarian, a stop we love to make every time we can make it.  Their vegan brunch is fantastic.

I woke up early on Sunday anyway, and went over to the National Geographic Museum, which I’d never seen before.  There aren’t a lot of DC museums that I haven’t visited, but this is one I’d always meant to see.  I was kind of surprised that it wasn’t much of a museum.  There were two rotating displays but I could find no permanent display, which I think is a disappointment.  I would have liked to see some kind of thing on the history of the National Geographic Society, about world travel.  I read Worlds to Explore a few years ago- some things out of that would be worth attempting in exhibit form.  Oh well.  Too bad.  One of the rotating exhibits was about Leonardo Da Vinci (link to the NatGeo page on the exhibit), which only barely interested me- I didn’t even make it all the way through.  The other was called Design for the Other 90%, which I did like.  It was a display of different designs created to improve access to water, energy, education, housing, communication, etc., for those who live in developing countries or who are underserved in a developed country.  It was very interesting, though I thought it was poorly designed itself.  I didn’t understand how some of the innovations worked, and felt that the video about the exhibit was poorly edited, jumped around, didn’t use its time wisely.  But oh well to that as well.  I did like the topographic map of the Grand Canyon that hung on the ceiling above the elevators in the lobby.  That was pretty cool.  So, I give the National Geographic Museum a C+ overall.  The gift shop was neat.  I found a lot of stuff that I just loved.

After the museum, I took the Metro to the Shaw/Howard University stop and hiked up the hill to Soul Vegetarian, which is on Georgia Avenue across from Howard University.  They were getting ready for the DC Caribbean Carnival at the Banneker Recreation Park along my route.  That was pretty cool to see, though I could only spy through the fence.  When I got to Soul Veg, they were still locked up even though they were supposed to open thirty minutes earlier.  That is the way that place goes, especially on Sundays.  But they let me sit upstairs in front of the air conditioner and eventually Tracy’s family showed up, we ordered and ate, and it was awesome.

Tracy’s parents were able to drop me off at the convention center later so that I could go to my afternoon meetings, which went well.  We got everything accomplished that we set out to do.

When we were done, I was going to take the shuttle bus back to my hotel but was hit by the impulse to seek out a bookstore.  Don’t ask.  For some reason, I never manage to find anything I want to buy among the cheap books for sale at the ALA conference publisher’s exhibits, but I’m always led to impulsive expensive purchases at nearby bookstores or at the airport later.  It’s a sickness.

But this led me down New York Avenue, where eventually I found a bookstore but not what I wanted.  I got on the Metro and went the wrong direction on the Red Line and ended up getting out at Union Station, where I made another impulsive decision to go up in search of ice cream or something cold.  I got a smoothie, and then decided to walk around for a little while, since I hadn’t been on the Mall yet.  I ended up walking from Union Station all the way to the Smithsonian Metro stop on the Mall, past the US Capitol and several museums and through the tents of the Smithsonian Folklife Festival, which was mostly closed for the day.  In total, it was about 4.5 miles of unplanned walk in nearly 100 degree weather, only made possible because DC ISN’T THAT HUMID.  I’m just saying.

I was heading right for the Metro elevator when music from one of the folklife festival tents caught me, and I made another impulsive decision to sit down and enjoy it for awhile.  It was traditional hula music with hula dancers as part of the Asian Pacific Americans program (one of the three programs that they choose each year for the event), which I have never seen live (as I have never been to Hawaii).  I really enjoyed it.  It felt like such a DC experience, wandering around among marble columns and discovering a cultural festival between monuments to old white men.  Really cool.

Eventually I was getting hungry again (even after the amazing Soul Veg brunch), so I metro’d north to Dupont Circle, where I ate dinner at Thai Chef, an old favorite that has not aged particularly well.  I was a little disappointed.  The staff was not very pleasant and I was sorry to see that they no longer would serve my curry dish in a little boat-shaped bowl.  Too bad.

I was pretty tired when I headed back to the hotel, and I didn’t realize how early it was until I was already nearly asleep.  It was a nice evening.  Exhausting.

The next morning I was due to another breakfast at a big hotel for a vendor.  The speaker was author Marilyn Johnson.  It went over pretty well.  And, after that, we were done with the conference!  My boss headed out to make a flight, hoping that incoming thunderstorms wouldn’t keep her from getting back to mid-Missouri (but they did).  I stopped by the conference for a few minutes to graze the exhibit floor one more time, and then took the shuttle bus back to the hotel where I checked out.  I walked around the block to pick up my rental car, and then I was off!

The plan was to stay with Tracy’s sister and her family in Rockville for the next two nights, see some old friends, and eating some good food before heading back to Missouri on Wednesday afternoon.  But I wasn’t due in Rockville until at least mid-afternoon.  And I love to drive around places that I used to frequent, to see how they’ve changed or whatever.  So I headed north to the Maryland suburb of Laurel, where I lived for a couple of years between 2002 and 2004.  It is a bit of a drive, though some people make the commute every day.  I actually lived in Scaggsville, and the area was pretty rural then.  There were cows and farms within five miles of the house, and I appreciated that.  Green space is important to me.  But a lot of it has been sold and developed in the past six years.  They were working on a bypass in that area which has drawn a substantial amount of businesses and McMansion neighborhoods.  I think the area has a new name that sounds better to potential homeowners than “Scaggsville”.  Anyway, it’s different.  I drove up to Clarksville to Roots Market, which has been there for nearly ten years, I think.  It was an outpost of health markets in an area that didn’t have a lot of health market stuff, but it has done very well.  I like to collect reusable grocery bags with the names of my favorite health markets on them, so I bought one at Roots along with some interesting ready-made vegetarian food.  Then I went south into Montgomery County towards Rockville, stopping to eat my lunch at a park.  It was all good.

By mid-afternoon, after a stop at a bookstore (where I was successful in locating an impulse book purchase), I was at Tracy’s sister’s house.  We spent most of Monday afternoon and evening chatting, playing with the baby, watching Jeopardy!, and eating vegetarian Chinese food.  It was a pretty good time.

On Tuesday, we bummed around for most of the morning, and then I headed back up to Laurel (via Greenbelt) to have lunch with an old friend/work colleague.  I hadn’t seen her in several years so we had a great conversation, playing catch-up.  When she had to head back to work, I drove up to Baltimore for no good reason except to drive around.  I just love to drive around.  At one point, I drove past the school that was used in the filming of season 4 of The Wire.  I am a huge fangirl so that was a super big deal for me.  But that was the only landmark from the show that I passed.  And then I needed to be heading back to DC because we had plans to meet up with other old friends for dinner.  I was a little concerned that I was leaving Baltimore too late, and that I might get stuck in traffic, but I managed to get from Baltimore to Rockville in less than forty-five minutes, which must be some kind of record.  Even Google maps doesn’t think I should have made that kind of time.

Dinner was with two old friends who married in 2006 and had a baby in 2009.  I used to know these friends quite well but we hadn’t seen each other in a few years.  This was my first time meeting the baby, who is now 14 months and quite the cutie-pie.  Their lives have changed completely since the last time we met, so though it was whiplash for me to see them as Moms, they have been living that way for quite awhile now!  Tracy’s sister’s baby is about nine months younger, so they will make good playmates eventually, when that age difference isn’t so major.

We bummed around again on Wednesday morning before I packed up my car to leave.  Before I headed to the airport, we met up with some other friends and had vegetarian Jamaican food for lunch.  I was later leaving for the airport after that than I would have wished, but again I didn’t encounter any traffic and made it to the airport with time to spare.

One bizarre thing happened at the airport.  They had announced the flight and I was standing around waiting for my row to be called when I noticed a guy walking around.  I recognized him immediately as my cousin’s bandmate, whom I have met a few times but don’t know well enough to approach.  So I just stood there, amused, until I happened to turn around and see my cousin, the guy himself, right behind me.  We both did a double-take and then hugged and chatted until we could board the plane.  It was a very weird coincidence, since it was a small regional flight from DC’s Reagan National Airport to Kansas City and they were on their way back from Europe.  But the band has always been based out of Kansas City, so it’s only weird that it was the same mid-week mid-afternoon flight, out of all the flights that either of us could have been on.  A fun coincidence.

My parents picked me up at the airport, which was totally sweet of them, because I didn’t have to wait around for the shuttle to pick me up much later in the evening.  I arrived home much sooner than expected, which was welcome.  I had to return to work on Thursday morning!

It was a pretty good trip.  I am only hitting the highlights here, but it was a pretty good trip.