A Trip to the Big City, Part 1

A few weeks ago, my dad and I decided to go to Washington DC to attend the "House Call" for the House of Representitives vote on the Healthcare bill. The following story will provide the details of our wild trip.

First of all, the "House Call" was broadcast on Foxnews and Sean Hannity's radio show on a Monday. The actual event (House Call) was to take place the following Thursday (only 3 days of notice). The event came about because Michelle Bachmann (Rep-MN) wanted to have a group of regular American folks come to the US Capitol building to protest the soon-to-be-voted-on bill.

So, although we did not receive much warning, we both were interested in going. Going to Washington DC for us was about a 12-13 hour drive, depending on traffic. We both decided on Tuesday night that we would go, and that meant we would have to leave on Wednesday afternoon around 3:00 CT (and that wasn't allowing much sleep time on Wednesday in order to arrive by the time the rally started at 12:00 ET).

However unprepared we were for the trip that was ahead of us, we set out with smiling faces and passionate hearts. We both were against the passage of the House Healthcare bill for many reasons (of which I will not discuss because the trip itself is enough to discuss), and we were excited because not only were we attending a rally, but we were also going to get to meet with our representatives face to face.

The beginning of the trip was somewhat uneventful. However, we swapped drivers just outside of Knoxville, TN and I was now in the driver's seat. I got on the interstate after filling up with gas, and we were on our way. After driving for an hour or so, I looked down at the odometer because I enjoy seeing the miles pass by when I'm on a long trip. The odometer read 117. Alright, 117 miles since the last fill up. About 5 minutes later, I looked down again--117. Again, I was happy because we had put 117 miles behind us since the last fill up. Once again, I looked at the odometer---117!! Of course, while we were on the trip, the odometer decided to fail. That was somewhat disheartening to me because then I knew we couldn't push the gas level too far towards empty because we didn't know what kind of mileage we were getting.

Anyway, I drove on listening to a different radio station every 15-20 minutes (because reception fades quickly and unexpectedly when you're driving 70 mph across the state of Virginia). We tried AM and FM, and while my dad was singing periodically, we mostly just scanned through the channels about 100 times!!

We swapped drivers one more time because my eyes were crossing, and we didn't drive much longer until my dad said he needed to stop for the "night". I put night in quotes because it was now 1:30 a.m. ET. We still had around 4-5 hours of driving to arrive in Washington DC. So, we stopped at the darkest hotel I've ever been to (except for a really obscure one in Helen, GA), but neither one of us even paid any attention to the decor, the odor, or the general condition of the hotel.

We were able to sleep from about 2:00 - 6:00 a.m. ET. This allowed us 15 minutes each to shower and get dressed to get back on the road again. Thankfully, my mom had packed us a cooler with some drinks and a bag of various snacks. Had she not packed the snacks/drinks, we probably wouldn't have ingested anything for breakfast because we were in a HUGE hurry. We got on the road around 6:30 a.m. ET, and we had to be at the Capitol building at 12:00. The first couple of hours of the ride meant time to eat and time to look up some parking areas in Washington DC. I used my myTouch phone to try and find as much detail about parking that I could, but I just didn't come up with more than one option. Since we only planned to do the trip a few days before, I hadn't had time to go out and get any specific directions or details about Washington DC.

When we got about an hour outside of DC (10:30 a.m. ET), my dad was starting to get a little frantic about where to park. We tried calling the number on the signs that is supposed to provide information, but the number has been disconnected at some point (why it was still on the sign is a mystery). So, he thought we might could park at Dulles Airport and catch a shuttle to DC. When we pulled of the Dulles exit, I informed him that Dulles was not even on the Washington DC portion of the map which meant it was around 50 miles away from DC still. So, we made a U-turn (which was not easy when 4 lanes of traffic are bearing down on us) and got back onto the interstate.

Still somewhat frantic, my dad decided to pull off at the Fairfax, VA exit to go into the Visitor's Center and see if we could get some more information. We didn't find the Visitor's Center, so he pulled into a gas station and went in. By now, it's 11:00, and that means we only have one hour to be at the steps of the Capitol. He comes back out somewhat excited because only two exits up there is a subway station that we can get on that will take us all the way to the heart of DC.

I know this is somewhat long, so I'll continue in a later post. :)