Washington DC: Day 1

We arrived in the nation’s capitol just after 6pm. Quickly we settled into the 1 bedroom apartment we’d rented for the week, cleaned up a little after the 7 hour drive and headed out to dinner.

The Wife wanted to go to Hard Rock, mostly to visit and add a shirt to her collection, but we decided to eat as well. We were staying at a place on the corner of E & 10th NE. The Hard Rock is on the corner of E & 10th NW. That makes it roughly 20 or so blocks away, 2 miles. We walked.

Washington DC is a beautiful city. There is a ton of history here and lots of old buildings. Perhaps I just haven’t hung around the right neighborhoods in Atlanta but that town never had that sort of presence to me. The first 10 blocks of our journey, from our temporary home to Union Station, was through a primarily residential area. Lots of homes with little gardens on their front steps. A few were for sale and we talked about how cool it would be to live here. I picked up the flyer for one of these homes. 2 bedrooms, 1.5 baths, kitchen, den… $800,000. Well, maybe after we win the lottery.

Once we passed Union Station we cross from the NE to the NW side, and the once declining street numbers started to rise. I don’t know if I have ever encountered this before. It seems like it would be sort of confusing… says the guy from Atlanta, land of a thousand Peachtree Streets.

This side was pretty much all business, but rather than the skyscraping towers of glass and steel you might get elsewhere, here the buildings all have a more storied and solid look. The city feels grand even though it isn’t tall. The business side also has homeless people. And a couple of sketchy areas, especially during the walk back after dark. Even so, I never felt in danger, but then I’m a guy and I’ve been told a semi-scary looking one too. It’s the shaved head and goatee.

It’s nice to be in walking distance of so much and I look forward to exploring over the next week here. I brought two pairs of shoes but I suspect I’ll be wearing the hiking boots most of the time. I like the look of my black sneakers and they are good for the office, but the padding is inadequate for long foot journeys. The Wife brought six pairs of shoes, none of them are hiking boots. And our first night walking she chose to wear sandals.

The blisters are epic. The last block or two I thought I was going to have to carry her, or leave her behind to save myself. Luckily we weren’t being chased by Nazis or zombies or Nazi zombies or zombie Nazis – there is a difference, one are Nazis who died and reanimated, the other are zombies who decided to become Nazis – so I didn’t have to make that choice, just walk a bit more slowly.

We returned to the apartment and tumbled into bed.

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