The Never Ending Journey to Washington DC!
Trip Start
Jul 17, 2010
1
12
18
Trip End
Aug 07, 2010
Washington DC, District of Columbia
Sunday, August 1, 2010
We stopped at about 10.30 for a Subways for breakfast, then carried on…..and on….and on……At one point Lyn noticed a bewildered looking small dog sat in the middle of the interstate!
We passed from South Carolina to North Carolina, with the South of the Border large signs, complete with pictures of Pedro in a poncho, every couple of feet for at least 70 miles! They were up in trees, everywhere. "Give Pedro your business!" We were in a state of real excitement to see what awaited us South of the Border; I wondered at times if we had taken a wrong turning and were heading towards Tijuana! After 70 long miles, we spotted the South of the Border theme park, and settled back down, exhausted with the excitement.
We passed the journey by reading (not Lyn!), playing on the PSP (not Lyn!), writing a story on the laptop (not Lyn!), writing up the blog on the laptop (Lyn helped verbally!), singing (not Lyn!) and listening to music (including Lyn!).
We stopped off at the Carolina Outlet Mall, and made a quick dash into Merell (Julie, I bought the mesh shoes like yours in pale lime green, 50% off, yay!!) where I was served by a VERY cute bloke who said to me “my name’s Kellan and it’s been my pleasure to serve you today Ma’am!”, he then wrote his name on the receipt and underlined the store telephone number…….do you think he was trying to tell me something???? Oh well, I can dream! Lezlie, he sounded just like Sawyer!!! Why didn’t he call me Freckles??
We then popped into Timberland where Lyn bought some stuff. We had to so a quick dash to get another T shirt for him when at the till, as this brought the overall price down! Crazy! We then stopped off at a fresh lemonade stall, where a nice southern gentleman was making lemonade. It was so nice, we went straight back and bought another one. He told us to “have a blessed day now y’all”.
Then came the 20 minutes up and down the I95 exits to find the only Harley Davidson dealer that was open on a Sunday. Yep, it was in the mall the whole time! Lyn bought a T shirt, and it was time to hit the road again.
We’d planned on stopping for lunch at an Applebees, but that never happened, so we stopped for some Dunkin Donuts. We then came off an exit to find a promised Ihop. But that never happened either!
We crossed the state line into Virginia; the end was in sight. Lyn had always guessed that the traffic might be bad going into Washington on a Sunday evening, and he was right. At about the 50 miles to go point we stopped for the first time, to crawl along a few hundred yards, to go back up to 70mph, to go back down to stop. This happened for the next 15-20 miles, and the next 90 minutes. We were all losing the will to live! We had expected it to be bad, but not this bad, this far out. In desperation we took a right turn off the I95 for a break, and we asked the Tomtom to give us an alternate route. We looped through Fredericksburg, which looked really nice. Maybe we’ll come back some time and see the battlefields. We went passed some lovely houses; this route was way more interesting! We got onto the A1A again, (we had been on this road at times in Florida and Georgia and Maine!) It seems to run from Key West in Florida, up to the Canadian border in Maine. Tonight this road was a race track, with lots of people like us, trying to go North, racing between traffic lights which were always on red! We climbed the first hills since leaving Wales, after doing well over a thousand miles on the flat. At one set of traffic lights we found ourselves in Quantico, home to the US Marines, and another Iwo Jima memorial. (Mmmm, marines!!). We may well come back here to the Marine museum.
We were all starving by now, so when we saw an Applebees at last we had to stop. I ordered Cajun lime tilapia (which would have made it the third time in 3 days to eat this fish!). When it came, I ate tow mouthfuls, thinking it tasted funny, maybe it was just so different to the really fresh fish I was used to further down south, on the coast. I was still a bit hesitant…I scraped off some of the topping……only to find it was bloody chicken. Aggghhhhh! I called the waitress back, she apologised, she had thought I said Fiesta Lime Chicken! Two years not eating meat……! The tilapia was brought to me, which I ate.
We headed back to the I95, which now seemed to be flowing. We were now 30 miles out, and hoped there would be no more delays. It was now dark, and there were thousands of red lights in front of us. We relied on Tomtom to navigate us through the labyrinth of intersections and lanes. Lyn said it was just like flying a plane at night, as it told him what lane to go in.
We sped past Potomac Mills; we will return! We were soon at our townhouse, and found our reserved parking space. We unloaded the car, and dumped it all in the living area. We were all knackered, and wanted to go to bed. It was 10.50pm. It had been a long, long, long day. I’m so glad we decided to fly down instead of driving. Good old Lyn; Superman strikes again!
Comments
OMG, well done Lyn! s like one hell of a drive, that's probably my worse nightmare driving like that!
Aw DC, and Potamac mills......leave me some bargains, hide them in the stores and will look for them in Spetember...LOL!!!
Weather here is horrible so make the most of sunshine and heat! Have a lovely and say Hi to Abe for me.
xxx
OMG Land of the Sawyer drawl?!!? lucky he didn't call you feckles your knees would have gone!! lol ((keep the number- you an ring it now and again just to get a fix hehehe))
Lovely dress Tegz, Ci's eye looks better too. :)
and Luce you are drinking constantly woman?!?! lmao what you like?!?!
Yeah...the stress bunny returns and i have almost caught up on the fab blog :). I am loving it all and all the photos. I did a 12 hour shift as is currently standard every day and left work at 1830 to go to barbers. There was such a queue waiting i was able to get my iphone out and catch up with all the blog and photos until you left the White House :). Not had chance to come back since. But loving it, loving it, loving it. I am very very jealous at the moment as just want to sit on a sun lounger in your white house with cocktail and watch the world go round :). Big Hugs all xxxx
Chirs, after a few of our cocktails I can assure you the world did go around. I used a wine glass as the measure, so it was a glass full of Vodka, Baileys and Kahlua with some ice !!! Two glasses had me flying, but the dirnk was SO nice it was addictive. It wrecked the game of life though, we had a P'ssed banker !!!