D.C. Trip: Final Thoughts
So my little trip to Our Nation’s Capitol concluded without any of those pesky arrests or getting put on any watch lists. That’s officially the furthest North I have ever been in my life.
Stopped by to walk around the Chancellorsville Battlefield for a couple hours which was very interesting, saw the spot where Stonewall Jackson was mortally wounded. Pretty amazing how small an area it was and how many people were trying to kill each other in it. Especially considering how rugged the terrain is. Also it makes you stop and consider just how many Americans died in four years of fighting in an area 100 miles in radius from the Capital.
Georgetown was a very nice little place even though the streets are narrow and there is this distinct mid-Atlantic preppie vibe to the place where everyone dresses like sitcom characters from the late 1990s. I half expected to see David Schwimmer as Ross Gellar sitting in the booth behind me at this nice little restaurant called The Tombs just in front of Georgetown University. Dockers and knit sweaters everywhere. Oh and trench coats. In Washington they love their trench coats. There are probably more trench coats per capita in the Washington area than in all the 1940s film noir films ever made.
Later I drove through the Shenandoah Valley which was quite pleasant. The ground is gently rolling and in some parts the hills are surmounted by huge McMansions that look like miniature castles and in others by tidy little cottages with picket fences and flowerbeds in front. Signs on the doors of businesses said things like “Gone Fishin’, back at 2:00 ” I rented a moving truck from a place that doubled as an antique store and was sorely tempted to ask how much the original Nixon/Agnew button behind the counter was.
The drive home took all night and all the next morning. I crossed the Appalachins in the dark, which wasn’t bad at all, though I wish I could have had a chance to appreciate the scenery. Some place in North Carolina, I can’t remember exactly because I was cracked out on Red Bull I wound around a mountain beside a river and off to the left you could see the river valley below and an endless swath of lights, like I had just stumbled on some vast metropolis even though I wasn’t even near a major city. No wonder they say that from space the entire Eastern Seaboard is one big X-mas Tree of lights.
In any case, I made it home safely and hope to find more time for some lovely political and economics posts. Read a couple interesting books I’d like to get reviews up for, one Dead End Gene Pool by Wendy Burden is a hilarious memoir and a kind of historiography of the Jet Set of the mid-late Twentieth Century, a delightfully irreverent look in to the lives of the Thurston Howell IIIs of the world. The other book was There Is No Alternative: Why Margaret Thatcher Matters, a political biography of the Iron Lady by Journalist Claire Berlinski that I think is a very timely book given the current state of US politics. So hopefully I’ll have those reviews up soon. Now I’m off to try and cure my Guinness-born hangover.
