Washington, DC Trip - Day 1 - 4.8.10 (29)

Washington, DC Trip – Day 1 – 4.8.10

April 16, 2010 | Photography, Travel Photography

I have never been to Washington, DC before. I’ve driven around it, but never actually went to see any of the historic sites and all that fun stuff. My girlfriend Kristen and I decided to go the week after Easter for an extended weekend. I liked the city, but I think we went during the worst possible week because of the cherry blossoms (which we missed the peak) and the festival that was happening that weekend. Let’s just say everything was jam packed!

The day started off with me driving 5 hours + down to DC from New York. Got down to our hotel, which was the Renaissance Mayflower Hotel. Very nice inside, and wasn’t too far from things. Only problem with that hotel, happened after we flushed the toilet and whoever was there before us decided to leave us a big clogged toilet. Yuck! I didn’t realize the toilet was clogged until I looked down while brushing my teeth to see myself standing in 2 inches of pee water. GOOD TIMES! But other than that, the hotel was nice and I used free wifi in the elevator lobby. No way I was going to pay 11 bucks a day for internet.

While the hotel cleaned out our bathroom, we decided to start our vacation with going up to the National Zoo. I don’t know what it is, but whenever I go on vacation I have to see zoos and cemeteries. It’s just something I like seeing for some odd reason. We took The Metro up to the zoo, and realized how hot it was. It was 85, and the pollen was out in full force. So going to a zoo, being very hot and all the pollen out triggered off an allergy attack for me. I was sneezing and blowing my nose every 2 seconds; just a miserable experience for me. I don’t think I stopped sneezing and blowing my nose until I was back in my hotel later. But I still enjoyed the zoo!

The Asia section sucked since none of the animals were out. They were probably sleeping since it was around noon. The pandas did come out which made up for it though. The crowds quickly swarmed in to take pictures of the panda. Its times like these that I loved that I own a 70-200mm f2.8 lens! It’s an ideal lens for concert photography but also zoo photography as well. I enjoyed watching the elephants from Sri Lanka, the small mammals, the gorillas and apes, the meerkats were cute and it’s always cool to see lions and tigers…no bears though.

After the zoo, we rested a bit before going back out. We needed to find some food and our area wasn’t really that great. So we walked to Georgetown, which not sure that was the smartest idea. We wanted to see how far it is, but it was only like a 25 minute walk or so. I really like the Georgetown area with all the shops and restaurants. We liked all the options of food there that we ended up going back every night. First night had some Italian food, then next night had some Indian food, and the last night we had some brick oven styled pizza. You can read more about that at Kristen’s food blog here.

What I didn’t like about Georgetown was the rude and obnoxious homeless bums. They were particularly rude and disrespectful to my girlfriend, so I’m sorry, but they’re not getting shit from me when they act that way. I’ll give buskers money, but when it’s just rude hobos shaking a cup and shouting at you…yeah you don’t deserve shit. But enough about them.

While we stopped in to get some frozen yogurt, I noticed a rain drop. When we got back out, all hell broke loose and a huge thunderstorm started! We ran to eat our frozen yogurt under something. We saw a taxi cab just drop someone off and he noticed us looking at him. He waved us over and we darted in and finished out yogurt in the cab. No way I was walking home in that! We figured out that we needed to take the Circulator bus from now on, which only cost a dollar. Definitely worth it! It was an interesting start to the day, to say the least. I’ll have more thoughts and musings on DC in the next blog.

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