Getting around DC

I just got back from a long road trip this past weekend. After visiting all the relatives in "old country", Mommy and I met up with Daddy in the "vacation house" in Washington DC. This is the first time I've ever been to "the District" and I really enjoyed seeing it. In the next few blog entries I'll recount some of the highlights.

One of the best things about DC are the many interesting modes of transportation. The excitement starts right from the vacation house. To get downstairs to the "vacation house restaurant", where breakfast is served, we have to take an elevator. There are two elevators in the vacation house. One of my favorite things to do was to guess which elevator was going to show up to pick us up. I would run to the bank of elevators and point at one of the closed sets of doors. "That one!" I'd say, usually pointing to the rightmost door. More often than by chance (Daddy was keeping track), I'd be right in my prediction. I was very happy with the floor they gave us for our vacation house. We were on the fifth floor and "5" is my favorite number.

When we'd go out to see the sights, Mommy would take us down to Washington Harbor, which is a little "harbor" on the banks of the Potomac. There, we'd wait for the blue bus. I liked riding the bus too. From the blue bus, we'd get onto the "Metro". This is DC's fabulous subway system. I liked to call it the "Newark Train". We would wait for the train to come. The lights on the edge of the platform would blink when the train was about to arrive. Then we'd take the train to all sorts of interesting places.

I also got to ride on an orange "trolley". Mommy told me it was not quite a real trolley since it didn't run on rails, but I liked how it looked. What I didn't like was all the traffic riding on the trolley. Trolley rides are slow. After a little while, I tired of the trolley. I'd suggest (with increasing urgency):

Trolley stop now. All done trolley. Want to get off. Want to get off. All done. No more trolley.

Mommy and Nainnie seemed to want to be done with the trolley too.

Finally, and best of all, I got to ride a canal boat pulled by mules. I even got to pet the mules too. I liked to visit the canal. Daddy told me that this canal was built to rapidly transport stuff from Washington DC to points to the west. Unfortunately, it was built around the same time as the B&O Railroad, so it never really worked out too well. Having ridden one of these boats, the transport on a canal is anything but rapid.