Washington, D.C.

Saturday morning, Siobhan and I are boarding a train to Washington, D.C., where we'll be staying for a week while we visit several of the Smithsonian museums. So I might not be blogging much next week, if at all. I'm not sure how much time I'll end up having, not to mention energy.

We plan to visit several of the Air and Space museums, the Spy Museum, the zoo, and the museums of Natural and American history. Some of those are on the National Mall so we'll certainly see, from a distance, the big landmarks (the Washington Monument, the Lincoln Memorial, the Capitol Building) but we aren't planning to visit them since our focus is on America's Attic. This is going to be one of those vacations where after it's done you need a vacation to recover!

This will also be our first long train trip; before this the longest I've done is a few hours, but here, we'll be on the train from Montpelier all the way to Union Station, 13 hours. We're aiming to avoid using the train snack bar for food because we assume it'll be overpriced and mediocre-at-best food, though we'll need to use it for beverages. (There are no stops on the route long enough for a meal.) As gastric bypass patients we need to eat multiple small meals, so we're planning things that can be easily carried in a backpack without being crushed, don't need to be kept cold, but will be satisfying. On the way out, we'll have sandwich makings and sausage pie (essentially a quiche made with Italian sausage and cheese). On the way back we'll have stuff from Acadiana like po'boys and meat pies.

We won't be renting a car there (too expensive), we'll be using public transport. Most of the time the buses will do fine, and some things we can walk to. We'll need a cab to and from the train, and there's one trip to an air and space museum that's near the airport, and to which there's no convenient bus, so we're trying to arrange a ride. It's because of that that we haven't been able to firm up our schedule: we need to put that on whatever date we can get a ride or two, and arrange everything else around it.