Washington Trip Report

Now that I've gotten a few hours sleep, I can write a little about my three day trip to D.C. We have a friend in Virginia, Dale Carpenter, who used to live out here in California and promoted gospel concerts. He moved to Virginia a few years back and has continued promoting back in that area. This was our second trip back there to work for him.

Our first trip, in October of 2003, was also a three day affair with concerts on Friday and Saturday night, as well as Sunday morning. This time we only had one concert on Saturday night, which gave us quite a bit of time for sightseeing. The other three guys had never been to D.C., and I hadn't been there since 1976, so we were all looking forward to seeing the nation's capital.

After flying all day Friday, we checking into the hotel, had some dinner, and then headed for the big city. Washington is a wacky city to try and drive in. The street layout may have made sense in the horse and buggy days, but makes life difficult for visitors today. It's very difficult to find parking anywhere, and many of the streets around major sites are blocked off due to the terrorism threat. After much circling and searching we did find a space on G street just west of the White House.

We walked over to Pennsylvania Avenue and headed down to the front of the White House. There weren't many people around, though security was everywhere. We were able to spend some time taking pictures and checking out what we could see from the street. We walked around the entire White House complex as darkness fell. D.C. is not a great place to be out walking after dark, so we headed back to the car and decided to go over to the Capitol building.

Every picture you see of D.C. shows the Washington monument and the Capitol prominently displayed, so you'd think you'd be able to see one or both of them from just about anywhere in the city. Not so. We managed to get ourselves nice and lost while trying to find Capitol hill, and when we did finally get near it, we were so turned around we almost headed out of town the wrong way. Fortunately, we got ourselves turned in the right direction and headed back to the hotel.

Saturday morning Dale drove down from his home in Linden and met us and all five of us headed back into D.C. Again we wandered for awhile before finding parking along the Mall. Our goal was to visit the National Air and Space Museum, which was just about all we had time for on Saturday. I'm an aviation buff, so I can spend hours looking at the historic planes they have there. It's a weird feeling to realize that as you wander through the huge facility, you're not just looking at replicas of famous airplanes, but you're looking at THE Wright Flyer, THE Spirit of St. Louis, and THE X-1 rocket plane in which Chuck Yeager first broke the sound barrier.

After lunch we drove in bumper-to-bumper traffic for miles headed west for the evening concert. We stayed in a historic hotel in Strasburg, and sang that evening at Riverton United Methodist Church in Front Royal. It was fun to be there and see all those folks again.

Our flight on Sunday wasn't until 2:25 pm, so we headed from our hotel in Strasburg back to the Dulles area and visited the Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center, the new wing of the National Air and Space Museum. This facility, nicknamed "America's Hangar", is huge and houses a bunch more famous aircraft, including the Space Shuttle Enterprise, a Concord, various WWI, WWII and Vietnam era military aircraft, and my personal favorite, the Enola Gay, the B-29 that dropped the first atomic bomb. I've always enjoyed reading about WWII missions, and to be able to see this historic aircraft up close was really something.

The flight home was uneventful until the last few minutes when we had a medical emergency on board. I'm not sure just what happened, but someone up front experienced some problems and hopefully they're okay today. We're glad to have a chance to do trips like this, but also glad to be home. Our first trip to Virginia in 2003 was the weekend of the big So Cal fires, and we ended up stuck in Phoenix after all flights to Southern California were canceled. We ended up renting a car and driving home from Arizona. That wasn't much fun at all.

This trip was also very useful for me, because in just two months the entire HolyCoast household will be headed back to Washington for a family vacation. At least now I have some ideas of what to expect and where to go in that town. I'm looking forward to it.