We had a very nice Christmas week. Our family celebration was earlier than normal. We met at Ed & Lynne’s for brunch on Christmas day. It was an enjoyable afternoon.
Thursday and Friday we went to DC. We took the MARC (commuter) train down. There is a station a little north of us at BWI airpirt and a station a little south of us in Odenton. Odenton is a little further, but it offers FREE PARKING. From Union station, we took the Metro to the Willard Hotel. This is an older hotel, but fabulously elegant, and a very short walk to the White House . Hotel occupancy is low during this week, and amazing deals are being offered on the Internet. We paid about 10% of the rack rate. I admit, that price on the back of the door is completely fictional, but the deal was nevertheless amazingly good. There are advantages to having a Medicaid card. It gets me half price fare on the MARC, half price rides on the Metro, and even a discount on the fabulously priced hotel.
National Christmas Tree
Thursday we started with breakfast at the Lincoln Waffle House (good, cheap food in a funky-dump environment). Then it was on to the Spy Museum. This is not a museum where one is likely to learn a lot. But it is well presented and highly entertaining. It’s not likely we will go back, but we are glad we went once. We had lunch in a popular hamburger joint, which some say has the best hamburgers in DC for the price. Then it was off to the National Theater for Porgy and Bess. It was my first ever opera. It’s a good thing that Danita and I read the synopsis on Wikipedia. It’s unlikely I will be digging deeper into the genre. For dinner, we went to Tosca. The restaurant offers Italian food, and it is magnificent. We had fixed-price dinners. Danita started with butternut squash soup, followed by pork tenderloin. I had gnocchi, followed by black ink tagliatelle with crab meat. We both finished with chocolate cake with a liquid chocolate center, vanilla-malt cream and chocolate sorbet. It was gourmet food with impeccable service. We finished the evening off by visiting the National Christmas tree, including a “pageant of peace”, which is comprised of one small Christmas tree for each state and US territory. These 56 trees are placed in a double-circle around the Ellipse. I’m not sure what makes this a “pageant of peace”, other than the states have not been at war with each other for over a century. But it was a good time. The crowds were every bit as large as the photo indicates. The National Tree was surrounded by several model railroads, complete with villages and towns.
Friday we planned to eat breakfast at the hotel. Our first attraction doesn’t open until 10. We thought it would be relaxing to stay in in the building all morning. But the hotel breakfast was 4 times more expensive than the perfectly acceptable breakfast offered just one block up the street. It was too much for us. We put on jackets, walked a block to breakfast, then came back to our room to relax until it was time to check out.
We visited the Phillips Collection to see an excellent Van Gogh exhibit. We were fortunate to have a membership at the Walters, which reciprocates with the Phillips. We got admission to the museum and exhibit tickets for free! We were also luck to arrive very close to opening time. The exhibit has been there for several months and will remain until late January. Nevertheless, it was quite popular. It was crowded when we were there, and mobbed by the time we left. The Phillips has quite an eclectic collection of art, including some of those very large paintings of squares. We ran into one of the people Danita works with. His wife is a successful artist. (She has had one-person shows in New York.) She was kind enough to sit with us and explain these paintings of squares. I appreciate them more than I ever did. But I still prefer traditional art.
Danita in DC. This caught my eye while we were walking in DC. I think it was the juxtaposition of the row house stores against the large modern building in the background.
The Phillips is near DuPont Circle, so we took the Metro to get there. On the way back, the weather was nice and our planned lunch place was off the metro path, so we walked several miles back. Our lunch stop had a reputation for excellent sandwiches. It was nice, the portions were generous, and the price was reasonable, but they were just sandwiches. Our last attraction was the Slacker Gallery to see a Yoga art exhibit. The Slacker is part of the Smithsonian. It is located on the other side of our hotel. Walking the entire route turned out to affect our experience at the Slacker, as we were somewhat tired. That might be part of the reason we were a little disappointed in the exhibit. Or maybe it’s just difficult to appreciate the subtlety of art from a foreign culture. Fortunately, we were able to join a docent tour. That helped us get more out of the exhibit.
Our trip home was uneventful. Bob Bauman once told us that some MARC train riders who use the Odenton stop own “clickers” that start their cars remotely. They brag about the range of their “clickers”, which lets them star their cars almost as they exit the train. They run off the train, jump the fence, and race to their cars in an extreme rush to get out of the lot. This behavior is induced, Bill said, by a very small access road with a long red light that creates a long line of cars, all trying to exit at the same time. He painted a picture of parking lot gridlock and an interminable wait. Our car’s clicker won’t remotely start our car. We walked sedately to the car, pulling our suitcase behind. We did experience a line leaving the parking lot, but the line wasn’t long and neither was the red light. We saw no frantic clicking, or fence-jumping, running, or gridlock. The train was so full that some people didn’t get seats. Maybe they’ve improved the access road. Or maybe Bill was quoting an urban myth. It’s too bad, because it was a great story.
The temperature outside is starting to warm up. It looks like this will be another beautiful day, sunny and warm (over 50 degrees). It’s a perfect time for a bike ride. I hope this finds everybody doing well.
