Basilio & Wendy-OUR HOME IS ON WHEELS: Transit

When in Rome, do like the Romans.

When in Washington, DC, take the transit. Trust me. You do not want to drive, or worse, park, in downtown Washington.

Transit in the city is widely available and fairly easy to navigate. It’s not nearly as complicated as all the transit maps make it seem. Even I could figure it out. And there is a reloadable payment card that you can use both on the subway and on the bus so you don’t need to carry cash.

From where we were camped, we would walk down this lovely wooded path to the road bordering the park and would catch a bus to the metro. It was only a 5 minute ride, and we were greeted by a very friendly fellow passing out free newspapers. What’s not to like?

A half hour ride on the subway got us right downtown to the National Mall where all the museums are. We took that particular route several times.

Our starting point on the metro system was in the north, in Maryland. There are actually 5 different metro routes that crisscross through DC .The longest transit trip we took was to the farthest western outskirts. It was to see the off-site portion of the Air & Space Museum located in Chantilly, Virginia. The jaunt south on our local line and the transfer to the end of the west line got us as far as Reston, Virginia.

That part of the trip took one and a half hours. The bus that took us the rest of the way was almost an hour itself! It severely cut down on our museum time, because we knew that the return trip would be just as long.

But we got to see some awesome flying machines in that place. It was huge! Big enough to hold the Discovery space shuttle, an Air France Concorde supersonic jet, the Enola Gay fighter, and hundreds of other fliers: helicopters, gliders, and everything in between.

Speaking of high fliers, some commuters in the capital city of the United States are a little more elitist than others. While walking through the cherry blossoms near the tidal basin downtown, multiple helicopters buzzed overhead, back and forth.

We were in the wrong area to see if any of them originated from the White House.

No matter how happy we are with taking transit, there are some places that it’s just not worth it. We drove to the National Arboretum because it only took 10 minutes compared to the hour long subway to bus transfer we would have had to incur. And parking there was free and plentiful. It may have been because not a lot of the flowers are in bloom yet, but that was okay by us. We still saw dogwood trees and lovely azaleas in full colour.

We would have gone there just for the bonsai trees. There was one that was greater than 400 years old.

The one I’ve shown is a youngster at only 150 years old. It is a Japanese Cypress tree and stands about a foot and a half tall.

Our last transit trip to Washington was to watch the Cherry Blossom Parade. It was a chilly 6C with a breeze that played havoc with the big floating balloons.

It wasn’t a particularly big parade, in number of participants, but it took 2 hours. They scheduled long breaks between each section of 3 displays; usually a band, a group of dancers, and a float or big balloon. Then another 3 or 4 minute break. It must have been hard on the kids watching. A lot of them dressed up in cherry blossom head bands for the event.