Jaunted

We got the hotel for $75 a night on Priceline (via a blind bid for a four-star in Georgetown/Foggy Bottom) only days before. With taxes and everything, it ended up at $90 a night. (I recommend betterbidding.com to get critical intel on your city of choice.) It was only 11:15 a.m. but we were able to check into the room, which was great. We waltzed right into room 632 with a view of an office building but otherwise good natural light. It was small but very tidy with nifty amenities, like a flat screen TV with HBO and a few high-def channels. The bathroom was great, especially the big shower with the sunflower-style shower head. The bed was comfy, though the pillows weren't great. There was no refrigerator, but there was an ice machine just down the hall.

We dropped off our stuff and immediately walked from the hotel to the Thompson Boat Center (the Google Maps walking directions helped) 15 minutes away. I wanted to get on the water asap to shake off my New York head as quickly as possible and get into vacation mode. We might flap our gums a lot about kayaking, but dammit, it's almost always worth doing. Everything proceeded really smoothly, and we were in a two-person kayak in minutes, which pleased me to no end. The weather was hot, sunny, and just a little bit muggy (DC humidity can be brutal) and in no time we were paddling the Potomac River.

We made a leisurely loop around Theodore Roosevelt Island. At one point we had a great view of the Lincoln Memorial. We asked some guys who had rented kayaks from the same place to take our picture. They were just paddling around, having a goof, same as us. There wasn't much motorboat traffic but there were a great many kayaks and canoes, which was cool. It took almost exactly one hour to make the loop around the island, and we didn't paddle very fast, stopping for a few minutes to eat roast beef sandwiches my mom had made. The total cost of a one-hour rental of a two-person kayak was $10.56, money well-spent.

On the way back to the hotel we stopped for a gelato at an indoor/outdoor mall near the boathouse. There was a big decorative fountain and I had the urge to jump in it. The water just looked so clear, blue, and cool. Anyway, after getting cleaned up in the room (using the awesome shower and watching some dumb show that looked cool because it was on high-def) and changed into going-out clothes, we met my old friend John Shaw downstairs. John lives nearby and had driven his Dodge Intrepid into town to show us around.

He drove us through several of the hip DC neighborhoods, like Adams Morgan, Dupont Circle, and the U Street Corridor. We ate what felt like a late lunch but was really an early dinner at 6pm at a restaurant/bar called Cafe Saint-Ex (named after the author of The Little Prince) John had a BLT and a cranberry juice mixed with ginger ale, Jenn had the sable entree and a Delirium Tremens, and I had a burger with cheddar and mushrooms and a Bellhaven Scotch Ale.

All of the food was top notch (I'd compare it to DuMont in Brooklyn) and the atmosphere was pleasant. There was some discussion about whether the local tap water contained unsafe amounts of lead, which led us to order bottled water.

After our early dinner, we walked around the neighborhood, poking our heads into Ben's Chili Bowl. It's a DC institution, but it was super crowded and they yelled at us to wait outside, so we just looked around quickly and then split.

Up until this point, I had the Magnetic Fields song Washington D.C. in my head, but while driving around we saw an intoxicated woman dancing on a street corner to some classic DC Go Go music, so from that moment my internal DC soundtrack turned from Stephin Merritt to Go Go (the two would make a fine mash-up). It's really a unique style to DC (the E.U. song Da Butt is Go Go, fyi) and I'm glad I heard a snippet of it. The dancing drunk woman was entertaining if a bit sad. She was clutching a plastic bottle of what looked like Smirnoff Vodka.

The parking situation was brutal, but once we found a spot, we walked up and down 18th Street, eventually stopping in a bar called L'Enfant, where we had a leisurely round of drinks.

Inspired to see more of the city, we made our way to the Albert Einstein Memorial, and took pictures of each other sitting in his lap. It's a great memorial, and I had never even heard of it. Very much worth seeing.

From there, we walked to the Lincoln Memorial. It was a little after 11:00 p.m. but it was still open and actually was fantastic.

There weren't big crowds and it was a beautiful night and the memorial was really striking. It was interesting to read the inscriptions on the walls, an excerpt from the Gettysburg Address on one side and an excerpt from his second inaugural speech on the other. Coming out of the place was a brilliant view of the reflecting pool and the Washington Monument on the end of it. Somebody really did a nice job laying all those monuments out.

After that, we walked the length of the Vietnam Veteran's Memorial and I thought what everybody thinks: that's a lot of names. Very sad and moving. From there John took us back to the hotel and headed home. I wanted to buy a beer to drink in the room but we couldn't find a place to buy beer anywhere, no delis, no groceries, no bodegas, nothing. It's hard to buy take-out beer in DC, so plan ahead for that.

[Photos: Victor Ozols]

Related Stories:
· 48 Hours in Washington D.C. - Part 1: Kayaking and Go Go Music [Jaunted]
· 48 Hours in Washington D.C. - Part 2: Loving Those Free Museums [Jaunted]
· 48 Hours in Washington D.C. - Part 3: Popped Collars and Lacklustre Cuisine [Jaunted]

Where: Washington, District of Columbia, United States

Tags: kayaking / Priceline / Active Travel / Go Go / Historical Travel / Monuments / Outdoor Travel

by Victor Ozols