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EVEN MORE DRIVING?!
I’ll admit that this was one time when the driving did seem to get a bit tedious, not so much for the duration, but I think more so because we were running out of awesome things to do in our itinerary and it was becoming more and more clear that our trip was coming to a close. Of course, not far down the road from our hotel was one particular landmark that Sara absolutely insisted that we visit on our way through…

Meet Pedro
Tucked just underneath the delicate line between North and South Carolina, South of the Border is one of those places that has nearly everything that a tourist could desire … assuming that said tourists are after cheap souvenirs, a tank of gas, and some quick photos with the locals, anyways! Apparently this is one of those places that the wife always stopped at when driving between South Florida and New York, much like I always made it a point to take a pitstop at one of those bars where the ladies don’t really wear much, ummmm, nevermind!

The ABCs of this business?! Always Be Comical!
Regardless, it was as good as anyplace else to get out and stretch one’s legs, and Sara got to enjoy a quick bit of nostalgia along the way, too. And of course, as you can see, the colorful backdrop if anything gave me a few more chances to pimp my book while we were there!

Have a ball … with my new book!

Normally it wouldn’t be safe to get this close to the elusive turquoise rhino, but luckily, he’s a bit of a fan…

The hippo, on the other hand – NOT A FAN!!!

More Driving…
Slowly and somewhat reluctantly inching closer to home, the next couple of days of our journey were primarily driving days – still not much more than six hours for either day, and frankly, the next large-scale trip that we do that even remotely resembles this one, that’s precisely how we’re going to do it! Sure, we probably could’ve just drove non-stop and did the next leg from DC to Jacksonville in one day, but man, that would’ve been one hell of a long day…

leaving DC, once we figured out how to get around this huge truck blocking the driveway!
First Stop – Fayetteville, NC
So the main selection criteria for this particular stop was – a) right off the freeway, halfway to Jacksonville; and b) the hotel can’t look like a dump. I mean, sure, we weren’t looking to blow the bank as the trip came to a close, but we’d managed to avoid general hotel creepiness for the past three weeks – no sense in compromising now! As you can see, the room was pretty plain and ordinary, and didn’t exactly offer us floor to ceiling views of anything, but it was a place to sleep that didn’t smell like mold, and really, that was good enough for us.

Then again, they did have complimentary cookies left out for us in the lobby!

plain, but sufficient
An Evening of Mallness
Having gotten in just before the dinner rush, we decided to just keep it low-key that evening. I think I did have some writing to do anyways, so we just took a quick trip out to the local mall and Walmart to pickup a few things, and then returned back to the hotel where Sara went to bed early and I was up toiling with words into the wee hours of the night…

sometimes after a long day of driving, it’s just a simple dinner of cheap Chinese food that really hits the spot
Look Both Ways – a Cautionary Tale
Probably the most interesting happening from our stay in Fayetteville occurred when we were coming back from the mall to our hotel. About a mile or two away, we slowed down to let a forensics truck with its lights flashing pass … as it turns out, he was actually responding to something that had happened directly in front of our hotel. When we got there, using an alternate driveway to get into the parking lot, there were a few on-lookers, but it was really hard to tell what was going on. They had a good portion of the road shutdown, but there weren’t any broken vehicles in sight…

Heading inside, I just asked at random passing by the front desk what had happened, expecting an “I don’t know.” The response that the young girl gave back, however, was anything but that – apparently somebody had gotten hit by a car trying to walk across the street, and she knew this not because she saw it, but because she had checked for the guy’s pulse to see if he had still been alive!!! I guess she ran out to see what had happened and none of the on-lookers would step in because he was pretty well mangled, so she actually reached down to check before going back to call 9-1-1. By now all sorts of flashy lights were on scene and the place was pretty hectic, but I sure as hell couldn’t imagine being the first one around to have to respond to something like that! I would hope that instincts would just kick in and take over, like it sounded like this lady’s did, even though she seemed a bit shaken up by it now, but you know, after the adrenaline wears off from touching a dead person, I’m pretty sure that you’re allowed that.

DC Epilogue
Although basically our single day of being tourists around Washington was long in duration and we were extremely exhausted by the time we got back to the hotel after meeting one of Sara’s friends for dinner, we definitely left feeling like we need to come back at one point to help fill in the gaps of some of the places that we had missed. Just looking at the museums alone, we probably could’ve spent another two or three days, and although we might’ve been able to squeeze an extra day like we had in Niagara, we were also to the point where our feets probably wouldn’t have lasted another day of walking around, and besides, we were inching closer and closer to that time when we would actually have to return back to reality… 🙁

Nonetheless, here’s one last sunset glimpse from the National Mall – DC would be a really pretty place if it wasn’t for all of the politicians!

from the 1939 New York World’s Fair
(Fun Fact: Walt Disney first debuted attractions that would later become the initial attractions for Disneyland at the 1964 World’s Fair!)

I’m not sure which is creepier – that this place even existed, or that so many people worked to do what they did here.

Life > Candy Land

a little reminder of our Carnival Cruise from last year!

Quite glad I didn’t grow up during that era – I’d have made a horrible seaman!

I was really amazed at how many full-sized trains and cars and whatnots they had in the transportation exhibit.

Apparently Mickey’s bosses weren’t behaving…

Ice Cream Break!!!

The budget’s 2,000 pages thick?! No wonder we’re thirteen trillion dollars in debt!

This hasn’t changed, despite the beliefs of some…

I remember Rock the Vote! Do they still do that? Admittedly that was back when MTV still rocked…

more creepy civil war paraphenalia

No wonder they haven’t caught him yet – they didn’t even spell his name right on the wanted poster!

And we’re outside again…

SO MUCH HISTORY!!!
So our original plan after touring the monuments was going to be spread out between the various branches of the Smithsonian along the mall – namely, the American History Museum, the Natural History Museum, and (the one I was looking forward to the most) the Air & Space Museum.

Needless to say, after probably about four straight hours within a single building, our plan had been revised to: see the American History Museum, come back later for everything else!

Where to Start, Where to Start?
I think pure awe is probably the best way to describe it – I never would’ve imagined each individual museum being so huge, maybe partly because admission is free and partly just how everything is laid out inside. I mean, the area doesn’t seem that big when you’re just walking around the hallways and four floors doesn’t seem like a whole lot, but when you get back into the actual exhibits, they seemed to go on forever! I constantly caught myself saying as we walked into another room – “Ooh – they have science stuff here, too? And stuff about transporation? And inventions? And pop culture?!“

The place just seemed to go on and on, and although I know that war plays a big part of our history (not to mention unfortunately our present), it was cool to see so many other aspects of our nation’s history in addition to the somewhat grusome stuff.

Sometimes Americans Were Kinda Jerks
One theme that I honestly and frankly couldn’t get over as we toured the various war exhibits was that not for nothing, but our country has a lot of really dark times in its past! There was definitely no sugar coating (which is a good thing, don’t get me wrong), but to see all of the racism of the civil war or the evils of World War II spelled out in front of me was really an eye-opener. I know that we were at war, but I sat and watched a couple of different videos about the bombs that we dropped on Japan and it’s really some devastating stuff.

Granted, it was interesting, and also a bit scary, to see some of the wartime propaganda from those days talking about rationing and ways that you could help support the troops, and it definitely made me glad that our wartime efforts today are a little different than they were before. And I know that a lot of it just has to do with my own perspectives about how we shouldn’t even be in the current wars that we’re in … it may not be well received to “support the troops, but not the war” like I do today, but it’s very clear that protestors back in those days were treated a little differently than just being called unpatriotic.

Definitely one of those parts of history that was important to learn about, but still happy to get to move on to brighter days!

History – More Than Just Us Blowing Things Up
Fortunately, although the war exhibits were quite big (they were a big part of our history, for better and for worse), there were also tons of other non-war-related exhibits, and one of my favorites, albeit somewhat small, was the wing dedicated to pop culture. I think it’ll be pretty obvious as to why…

More to come…
While I couldn’t possibly write about everything that we saw in the few hours that we wandered the halls of the Smithsonian, I think my next post is going to be a photo post with more highlights so I don’t feel like I’m leaving anything out.

You know, just to prove that there’s more to American history than war and Kermit the Frog… 😉

There’s No Way Like the Subway
I’ll admit that riding the subway was something that I was both curious and a bit nervous about – nervous, again for the same big city, what if we get mugged or something perspective, and curious I think more so just because of all of the architecture that is needed for something like the subway to exist. The whole thing reminded me of something out of Men in Black – walking underground into this gigantic tube, which was kind of creepy until an actual train showed up. Maybe it’s because I’ve seen subway tunnels in a lot of post-apocalyptic movies and stuff … parts of it were kinda cool, but I was still awfully happy to see the sunlight again when we had traveled the couple of miles from the station down the street from our hotel down to the actual National Mall itself!

A LONG Walk Down the National Mall
Seriously, I don’t remember the mall being that long the last time I was in DC, and granted, I was something like six years-old, but if anything, you’d think that I’d recall it even more on account of having tiny legs at the time! Maybe I relied more on the Mom and Dad – CARRY ME! mode of transportation more that time … who knows?

Anyways, despite being incredibly long and my being horribly out of shape, this was a nice walk that probably took up a couple hours of our day. We basically ended up walking from the subway station at the Smithsonian all the way down to the Lincoln Memorial, passing the Washington Monument and the World War II Memorial on the way. Even though I’m not at all much of a history buff, it was pretty cool to see some of the most historic landmarks that our country is known for, and the combination of a small breeze and a distinct lack of huge mobs of people just made this is really nice way to spend the first part of our day…

Paying Respect Where Respect Is Due
Granted, we didn’t walk over to the other two war memorials – I think one was closed off and we were getting tired by the time the other would’ve come up – but we did spend some time wandering around the WWII memorial because it’s directly between the Washington Monument and the Lincoln Memorial, and it was kind of neat to see everything that went into the site, taking notice of the details like representation for all of the states, the stars (below) representing those who died in the war, and so forth.

Next Up: the Smithsonian National Museum of American History … which definitely is going to need its own post!

Worst. Driving. Almost.
I really had no idea what to expect driving into Washington D.C., but having already experienced not fun driving in Toronto, I wasn’t taking any chances! Fortunately, we didn’t really have far to drive and the time was mid-afternoon, so we probably hit the best conditions that were going to be possible. We employed the stay in one lane and hope it’s the right one policy and followed that all the way into the city, which still got crazy at times because some routes were just randomly closed without more than a mile’s notice. The worst was actually probably the surface streets trying to find our hotel … needless to say, I was just happy to finally see that we were there…

Sometimes Fancy = Awkward
I’m just going to be frank – this was probably my least favorite hotel during our entire trip, even though it was among the most expensive. My problem was that it just felt really fancy and trendy and unlike, say, the upscale hotel that we stayed at overlooking the Falls, I just felt extraordinarily out of place here. Something as simple as getting ice just felt really awkward because I had to call down to the front desk and ask that they send some up … maybe it was the tipping, because I had to go out of my way to get extra cash and even then didn’t know what to tip.

We tried cooling down in the pool up on the roof, except it was the kind of place where more people lounged around smoking cigars by the pool than actually going in it. We ultimately retreated back to the room to just kick back with dinner and a movie when we realized that the pool would be closing soon because it turned into a rooftop club in the evening hours! Yeah … out of place is one way to describe it…

A Double-Whammy Night In
Room service and a pay-per-view movie had proven to be a fun relaxant before, however I suppose ultimately it just wasn’t in the cards for us that evening in this strange and fancy, new town. I don’t even remember the name of the dish I had, except that it was the noodle thing that you see below and it was both overpriced and under-flavored. I do recall the name of the movie, mainly because it was fucking horrible – all I’ll say is that the people who made Get Him to the Greek should be ashamed for making such a shitty spin-off of such a great flick like Forgetting Sarah Marshall.

Maybe it was time to just get some sleep and try again the next day!