Washington DC

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.

Arriving in DC

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, drinks and snacks from the 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.

Walking around the hotel, we found an Arlington Temple UMC that was curiously also being used as a gas station on its first floor.

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.

Table Church

We used Gemini AI to find a progressive congregation, which led us to Table Church, 5 miles north of downtown DC. We were very moved by the church’s message and worship. Christine would have loved to join the church if we lived in the area. It was a tiny church with only 20 people attending. I looked them up and turns out that most of their congregation join the service online.

They have different elders rotating and taking roles. The preaching elder today had a strong british accent. At one point, one of the elders was praying and praying for the oppression against people of color and LGBTQ communities to end, and he described the joy being free of oppression as “haha”, as in the people laughing in joy. But it sounded quite quaint when put in the prayer. It was something like “God, even this force of evil is oppressing us… on the day of glory, we will rise and we will all be joining in our ‘haha.’”

After service, I looked up any nearby restaurants for lunch and we went to Mama Chepa Cocina Latina. They had the BEST birria taco we had ever tasted. I mean I’m not very experienced with birria tacos. But this one was toasted golden with a crunchy crust and it was amazing.

Driving back from the church, we passed across some large cilindrical installations. We got curious and looked it up. Turns out that they were what remained of a water purification system developed over a hundred years ago.

Natural History Museum

The information we found online indicated that the museum would be very packed every day and that early morning was the best time for a visit. We didn’t feel like getting up early anyway. We got to the museum at 11am. It was pretty busy and most of them were school children. 

Being packed with school children was the perfect vibe for us! We can just speak out loud and run around and we were just blending in. Dinosaurs! Giant bones!

Christine loved the third floor section with minerals. We likes looking at different types of rocks. The minerals section allowed visitors to touch a handful of rocks. I was telling Christine “baby, no touching!” and Christine pointed out that they had a signage indicating to please touch the rocks.

There was an unexpected African & African-American history section, which I imagine is helpful to raise awareness with so many children who visit the museum. Although expectedly, we ran into a group of children who ran from the dinosaurs section to the African-American section and complained that it was boring. I mean, nothing can beat the T-Rex..

We skipped the mammals section. Maybe in another visit in the future?

Turns out that the giant brontosaurus is not in the DC Natural History Museum. It’s in the Field Museum in Chicago.

We had lunch at Tatte Bakery, which Jason and Rebecca had recommended. They had recreated one of Tatte’s desserts and we got to try it in Long Beach, so we went to taste the OG one. It was kind of dry. Jason & Rebecca’s tasted better. 

We spent some time in the bakery, escaping from the heat, then returned to the hotel to rest. I took note of the location of the Grand Hyatt and Waldorf Astoria, which are just about walking distance from the museums.

African-American Museum

On Tuesday, we visited the National Museum of African American History and Culture. We had lunch at Ravenna Pizza and arrived to the museum at 2:30 PM. Unlike this musem was packed with hundreds of school children on guided field trips across every floor. We also had to make a free reservation ahead of time. They are not terribly strict with the times, but they do require the reservation.

I thought that we could make the tour easy by starting from the top floor and walking down the stairs after finishing each floor. So we started from the 4th floor, which has the Black arts and culture exhibit. I was impressed with the presentation style of the exhibit! I haven’t been to too many museums, but I haven’t seen the style where the exhibit item is behind a glass and the explanation text is inscripted over the glass itself.

After finishing the 4th floor, I figured that we would not be able to finish all the floors in time. So we decided to go for the most important exhibit, Floor 1 – history of slavery and the fight for abolition. We observed historical artifacts like slave ship handcuffs, giant wall quotes, and an iconic segregation-era train car showing distinct white and black passenger zones.

From there, we took the Metro Red Line north to Grosvenor-Strathmore Station to meet Uncle Jim for dinner. While looking at the station through Google Maps satellite images, I realized that this is a very suburban setting – the station is in the middle of nowhere and there aren’t cafes that we can wait at from a walking distance. So instead of going early here and waiting in the heatwave, we tried to time it to arrive exactly at our meeting time. It looked like Uncle Jim thought the same thing and came over early to pick us up asap. We went to another branch of Yu Noodles for some chinese food.

After dinner, we felt we should walk around the National Mall at least once. So we walked there as the sun was setting. There were a lot of strange wooden structures getting built in the national mall. Looking back, these must have been the setup for the Fourth of July Fair.

Cary, North Carolina

We flew from DCA to RDU Airport on Wednesday. In DCA, we used the Admirals Club with Christine’s Citi Strata pass. We somehow blanked out completely on the boarding announcements, boarded very late, and had to gate check our luggage. When we arrived, between getting the luggage and a malfunctioning rental car exit gate that backlogged a dozen cars, we made it just in time for our dinner with Christine’s cousin Jeff.

We met with Jeff at Lawrence Barbecue in Cary, one of the suburbs of Raleigh. We caught up on Christine’s relatives living around the larger Raleigh area. He coaches high school sports as a hobby. I could see how he was very expressive when talking. His eyebrows and overall facial muscles moved constantly. It makes the conversation very warm and inviting. I could imagine how his pep talks would be very effective.

Jeff highly recommended that we check out Cary, his hometown and one of the most beautiful towns in the US in his opinion. I was a bit hesitant because it was 95 degrees earlier in the afternoon. But we walked out at 7pm.. And it was actually manageable. With the winds, it felt unexpectedly fresh and cool. We got some icecream and walked through the Downtown Cary Park. It’s a very nice park surrounded by picturesque apartments, a sky bridge spanning the width of the park, and a futuristic looking dome sculpture over the pond.

There were what appeared to be social media influencers in somewhat anime-styled costumes using the sculpture as a backdrop for a photoshoot. While crossing the sky bridge, we had a chance to see up close an encounter between a hawk and a small mockingbird that kept dive-bombing against the hawk. The hawk seemed to be looking for something in the distance.

We stayed the night at Hyatt House RDU Brier Creek and received an unprompted upgrade from a King Cove to a King Studio. Couch, dining table, kitchen.. ah.. I wish we had had this much space in our hotel in Arlington. Their breakfast was also good, as good as Arlington’s.

Flying to New York

We traveled to New York on Thursday. This was the most strenuous of our travel days. We were flying on JetBlue, but I booked a dummy AA flight to access the admirals club. The DCA-RDU flight was 2pm the previous day and the RDU-JFK flight at 12pm, which meant that we could reuse the same Citi Strata 24-hour lounge pass just before it expired.

Then on top of all that, I saw a flight credit offer of $300 per person to be in the volunteer list to change our flight to another time. I was clearly being too greedy on something that was already bending the rules. I signed up for the volunteer list and then showed up at the gate to ask for the bump. We had to wait in the gate until 12pm to see if they needed any volunteers. Because we had two people offering to bump, they skipped us and chose one passenger instead. (My AA Plat might also have contributed to them skipping us). Brightened, the ground staff informed us that we were good to board! We smiled, said thank you, and walked away as I cancelled the flight… the walk of shame.

I cancelled that flight and booked another one for later. As we were getting ready to enter the AA Lounge, the AA app started acting up, and wouldn’t let us load the Citi pass.The lounge staff said that they could load up the pass from their end with our boarding pass. I told her that we had a lounge pass use from yesterday that was still active. (It was just barely active at this point – it had 30 minutes left). Apparently the staff made a mistake and reused one pass from the previous day, but didn’t see the other one and instead activated a new one from her lounge stash. This means that we won’t have 2 lounge passes for our AA flight in the fall.

The flight was pretty turbulent and our transportation from the airport was rough. The 3pm AirTrain was packed, unlike when we took the AirTrain at 9pm in our last trip.  We transferred to the Long Island Railroad Train ant got off the Penn Station. From there, we walked to the 33th St Station and tried to find the R train, but we were very lost and almost took the New Jersey PATH Train by mistake. 

We accidentally took the R train north (I thought “uptown” was Manhattan. Even after boarding, I was very confused trying to decipher a metro map that had strange station names like “solutions”, “delivery”. It took me a while to figure out that an AI tech company had bought out every display board with a takeover ad, printing confusing mock subway maps to promote their product. 

After realizing our mistake, we had to haul our suitcases back up the stairs, cross the overpass, and descend to the opposite platform to ride downtown. Carrying the suitcases up and down the stairs was pretty hard. We had a final  10-block walk from Canal St station to our hotel. The sidewalks were narrow, full of deep puddles, and heavily crowded with tourists and street vendors in Chinatown. In our previous trip to New York, we had only brought a backpack for a 3-night stay, so we didn’t realize how challenging a subway ride can be when we are carrying suitcases. We arrived to the hotel exhausted. I told Christine that on our return ride we should get a taxi to Penn Station.

Unlike the LA metro, the New York subways forced us to haul our suitcases up and down the stairs. We only took light backpacks in our previous New York and Toronto trips. We had forgotten how many stairs were in New York metro system.

When we finally got to the New York Bowery 50 Hotel we were pretty tired. I begged for a room with a couch, any room with a couch. The manager assigned us a Junior Suite in the third floor. Yes! Finally a room with a couch.

Hotel 50 Bowery

I picked this hotel to be in the middle of all the Chinese eateries. It was amazing. The place is surrounded by affordable eateries in all directions.

The rooftop restaurant serves breakfast, which was pretty basic and pretty expensive. They are contracted out by the hotel to handle food. They gave us $25 vouchers per person for each night we stayed (2). We didn’t eat breakfast here on the first night, and they let us use two vouchers on one meal. We got a $14 fruit bowl, $20 for a two-egg plate.

Outside of breakfast and dinnertime, the restaurant is closed. But the space is available. It’s a nice space with an outdoor patio overlooking the New York cityscape, and plenty of couches and seats everywhere. We saw a couple bring food from outside and eat it there, (they brought stuff from like 15 instagram places lol) so we decided to do the same. Our dumpling leftovers and baked goods from Bake Factory. We started eating outside but was too windy so we came inside. Despite the wind, it was also very sunny. After lunch, I took a long nap on the outdoor couches in the warm sun.

The hotel also had a very large lounging space in the second floor as well.

Eating in Chinatown

Peking Duck House: We used our Amex Gold Resy credits on Thursday night for a $60/person multi-course menu. It included an appetizer, soup choice, sampler platter, Peking duck, a main lobster entrée, fried rice, and fruit. The duck assembly looked more like a chicken burrito than Korean Tteok-galbi, and we got a massive amount of excellent food.

Katz’s Delicatessen: We visited Friday morning at 8:30 AM. Unlike our dinner attempt two years ago that had a 100-person queue, the morning was quiet with no line and mostly empty tables. We navigated the strict entry ticketing ritual (which carries a $50 lost ticket fine) and tipped the carver $5 directly. The counter workers spoke with thick local accents (“What do you think?”). We sat near the famous When Harry Met Sally table. My pastrami sandwich was heavily piled with meat, though it easily fell apart because of the standard, untoasted bread; it tasted best when I paired it with mustard. We walked off our meal by taking a mile-long linear park extending north-to-south back to the hotel.

North Dumpling: We hit this cheap-eats Google recommendation, which had 4.7 stars from 300 reviews. The shop was empty except for one local diner, and later filled with white tourists. We were disappointed; the blanched vegetables with sauce were basic, the dumpling skins were way too thick and undercooked (making an audible crunchy sound), and the meat filling lacked seasoning. I tried the pork “pancake,” which turned out to be thick sandwich bread resembling a veggie-stuffed bánh mì.

Thai Food Mix: For our Friday dinner, the Thai restaurant we saved was entirely too packed. We walked through a Little Italy block party where the streets were closed for outdoor dining tables, and decided to order Thai curry and Thai fried chicken to go. Along the way, we picked up sponge cakes, pork pineapple buns, a steamed pork bun, and dried meat jerky from a Malaysian vendor. We ate the entire spread in the hotel’s empty, couch-lined second-floor lounge.

Flights

We originally booked our flight from LAX to Washington DC on Alaska Airlines using 17.5k miles. I initially booked with my AA Platinum frequent flyer number attached, which let me choose “Preferred Seats” for free. Two weeks before the flight, I changed the FF number to Alaska, (so that it would count Alaska status points) but we managed to keep our seats. After checking in, I noticed that the system had somehow put us at the top of the upgrade list. Gemini described this as the previous Oneworld Sapphire status “sticking” around. To take advantage of this, I went to the gate to ask for extra legroom seats, even if it meant sitting separately in middle seats. The gate agents assigned us those seats, and we went to the lounge, satisfied.

As we were walking out of the lounge to board, I noticed that we had been automatically upgraded to first class! Maybe someone canceled. Four passengers in total were upgraded. The flight was very restful.

Going back to JFK, we asked to hotel to call us a Yellow Cab to Penn Station. Just as we were on the road, it started raining and the traffic slowed down. We had plenty of time, though. The taxi driver asked us about where we were going and kept talking nonstop in a language that was not english.. italian.. or hindi.. or one of the eastern european languages. At first, I thought he was talking to me, but he was actually on the phone with someone, chatting away. He never got off the phone for the entire 30 minutes it took to go to Penn Station.

Once we reached Penn, it was a pretty straightforward LIRR-Air Train to get to JFK. As we got to the AirTrain platform, it was very busy with 20+ people waiting on each door. We skipped that train and waited for the next one, since we would be first in line on that one. It worked and we were able to sit during the long ride to Terminal 8.

One of the goals of this trip was to get to JFK’s American Airlines first class lounge (Chelsea Lounge) one last time before AA retired its transcontinental flagship first, therefore making it impossible to access that lounge on domestic flights. I was able to book with 40k Avios via Finnair for a Saturday night flight, which sees the least demand. We had been to this lounge two years ago, but we visited at 5am and their breakfast felt pretty basic. I was looking forward to find what they serve in this lounge.

We made some time in the Greenwhich Lounge, getting some desserts, as we were a bit early for dinner. Then we headed to Chelsea.

Unfortunately, I was too full from our 2pm Shanghai Joe lunch. They had steaks and other good looking menus, but I couldn’t eat anything. I got a plate of asparagus. Christine felt that Greenwich’s dessert options (cakes) were better than Chelsea’s whipped cream cone.. thing.

Delta One LAX felt better. Nicer dinner options (I think?) and that massage chair. Chelsea was kind of underwhelming. Well, I guess we got it off our points travel bucket list. The flight back on lie-flat transcon first was very nice as usual.

Cost

Costs for two people came out to $1,300 plus 230k credit card points. The 230k points covered flights and hotels that would have cost $7,000 in cash.

• $10 + 35k Alaska miles for LAX-DCA Alaska Y flight
• $10 + 80k Finnair Avios for JFK-LAX American F flight
• $30 + 9k Alaska miles for DCA-RDU American Y
• $10 + 17k Qatar Avios for RDU-JFK Jetblue Y
• 60k Chase points for 5 nights at Hyatt Centric Arlington
• 7k Chase points for 1 night at Hyatt Place RDU/Brier Creek
• 43k Chase points for 2 nights at New York Bowery 50 Hotel
• $130 LAX Airport Taxi
• $80 Car Rental DCA
• $40 Car Rental RDU
• $40 Public Transit
• $90 Transport to/from JFK Airport
• $600 Food
• $90 Tips, Massage, Laundry
• $170 Credit Card Fees