Amtrak Adventures – Washington DC

This is the travel journal of two British girls travelling across the great expanse of North America. Spending most of that time on very slow trains…

Washington DC was one of the places I was most excited about visiting and I’m pleased to say it didn’t let me down. During the train journey alone we notched up more and more US states. We’d so far only managed New York state but three hours later we’d added New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Maryland and Delaware to the list. Good effort. (We didn’t technically set foot in any of these states… but we certainly travelled through them and admired from the comfort of our reclining armchairs.) Arrived about 7.30pm in DC and jumped on what I lovingly termed the ‘retro metro‘ (a brilliant piece of 1970s concrete modernism) to head to our hostel – HI-DC.

We made an instant enemy in the form of the woman on the reception desk. Just a word of advice, do not mess with a sweaty pair of British girls. As she laboriously checked us in I could feel my life slowly ebbing away – a few hours on the train had made us desperate to get out and explore. But this misery was soon forgot about when we met some very chirpy Japanese girls in our room. Then we set out to explore the Capital…

Martina and I both have different reasons to have been excited by our visit to Washington – although both framed by TV references. I am a big fan of the West Wing and was a little bit giddy about the prospect of a town full of Joshes, CJs and Tobys. Also I had a teenage fascination with the Watergate scandal so had some quite geeky points of reference. For Martina it was all about the X-Files and the possibility of some Mulder and Scully reinactment. By the end of our two and a half days in the city we would both have achieved something special relating to both these shows…

The first night we headed to Georgetown on another exciting bit of Washington transportation – The Circulator. How one bus could give us so much pleasure I don’t know but it did. We rode the bus to Georgetown and sat ourselves down in a friendly sports bar. Here, Martina and I fell into a trap that would soon become familiar. We drank through any hunger we had and ended up forgetting to eat – leaving Georgetown many hours later beered up and hungry. We eventually satiated our appetites with M&Ms from the hostel vending machine.

The next morning we met our first nemesis. Planning to gorge ourselves on the hostel’s free brekkie, we encountered a woman who could suck the joy out of any room. She was a surly, burly piece of work who guarded the breakfast buffet and revelled in lecturing hostel dwellers in the correct way to use the plastic tongs. We gobbled bagels and ran.

What followed was the most impressive day of sightseeing I think I’ve ever been part of. We were ambling towards the White House hoping to take a cheesy tourist photo or two. When we got there we were met by a delightful American lady, who encouraged us to go on a garden tour of the White House at midday – it was a ‘real treat’, apparently. We just thought this was the usual photo op so came back at our allotted time and followed a group into the White House gardens. Yes, into the gardens themselves. It took a while for it to dawn on us, that we were actually in President Bush’s garden looking at the trees previous presidents have planted over the years. (Insert your own Bush’s bushes pun here). It was amazing and we were so close to the house and the West Wing I came over all over-excited. On leaving, we were still were a bit bemused so asked security what was going on and they said it only happens a few times a year! We are lucky lucky bastards.

The rest of the day was jammed packed – Lincoln memorial, Washington memorial, Arlington cemetery, Capitol Hill and the FBI building (where we played X-Files). And what made it even better was that it’s all free!

A brilliant day was finished off with some beers in a beerhall called RFD and a couple more doses of being ID’d (our youthful looks getting us in trouble everywhere we went).

Our last day in Washington was spent mostly in the Air and Space museum where I again was over-whelmed by excitement. The spacesuits, the spacecraft, the aeroplanes – it was all super! As a kid who grew up wanting to be an astronaut it was fascinating. And bits of the American History museum had been transported there temporarily too so it was like two great museums for the price of one. (That price incidentally was zero – Washington’s got it all right as far as I’m concerned.) We also admired some of the tourist t-shirt stalls outside the museum and particularly a very fetching ‘Hillary wants YOU’ one took our fancy.

Such a great place and I could have spent much longer in the city. Alas our train to Chicago left at 4pm so we once more strapped on our backpacks and headed to Union Station for another glorious Amtrak train.