We traveled to Washington, D.C. from May 15 to May 24. We visited Uncle Jim, the Natural History Museum, the African American Museum, cousin Jeff, and Manhattan’s Chinatown.
Friday
Unfortunately, we found that our trip would overlap exactly with a brief heatwave in D.C. from Sunday through Wednesday. Although it started chilly and cloudy, it warmed up into the mid-80s on Saturday, and by Monday it hit 95. Surprisingly, the humidity was not very high. As long as we stayed in the shade, we did okay.
Our connection from DCA to the Hyatt Regency Arlington was the smoothest airport rail experience we have ever had. Our hotel was only a 15-minute subway ride from the airport terminal.
We grabbed a quick taco bowl at Chipotle and drinks & snacks from a local supermarket.
The room they gave us faces the Potomac River. We could see every airplane landing at DCA every ten minutes while lying on the bed. This would be an airplane nerd’s heaven. The hotel breakfast was pretty disappointing. The scrambled eggs were better than at a Hyatt Place, but that was it. I guess this was partly due to how incredible the breakfast in Sacramento had been last month.
Great Falls Park
On Saturday, we returned to the airport to rent a car. Our plan was to use Hertz PC’s 4-hour grace policy to rent a car from Saturday at 11:00 AM to Sunday at 3:00 PM. That way, we could use the car twice—once to meet with Uncle Jim and once to go to church on Sunday—without being limited by public transit options when picking a church. There was subway repair work happening between Pentagon City station and DCA, so we had to transfer to a shuttle bus, which made things a bit slower.
We met Uncle Jim at a traditional dim sum place, but unfortunately, we had eaten breakfast a bit late that day and were too full. We ate a little and then headed out to Uncle Jim’s favorite hiking spot at Great Falls.
We decided to drive to a nearby supermarket and carpool from there. Uncle Jim was used to giving directions the old-fashioned way, so he struggled to tell us how to get there. “Go on this street until you hit the stoplight, then turn right, then at the butcher shop turn left.” We asked him the name of the place, but he only knew it in that format—no address or name. After some searching, we figured out the supermarket and drove there using Google Maps navigation. Uncle Jim seemed skeptical that it would work, so he confirmed the turning directions multiple times before we took off. Lol 🙂
During our walk, we talked about our lives lately, traveling, his health, and his plans to replace his aging vehicle with a larger car. I was a bit worried about the heat, but it wasn’t so bad on Saturday afternoon yet, and it was a beautiful 20-minute walk with lots of birds and squirrels! Interestingly, the entire path was fenced off so that people would stay on the wooden walkway. People stray off from the path sometimes and die in the fast-moving river. We grabbed ice cream and drinks in the Potomac area and set another dinner meetup for Tuesday.
We took a nap at the hotel and then went to dinner at Yu Noodles. This place was awesome and had great, creative noodles! We had the sesame noodles and the Yu Village cold noodles.
Leave a Reply