Taking DC by storm (or bus)

This week we have ventured into Washington DC with visiting family members in tow, who are eager to see our nation's capital, the area where we live, our favorite grocery store, all 5,782 local Starbucks, etc. As is generally true whenever Joe and I travel by car -- surrounded by maps and printouts of Google directions -- we have seen many areas we had never seen before, and had not intended to see. This is why we so far have resisted the urge to get a GPS, knowing that it would deliver us directly to our destination, and we would miss the wonderful opportunity of seeing new vistas, mostly consisting of numerous buildings with shot-out windows. Our passengers have been truly amazed at our ability to sniff out areas that could, potentially, end up in the news on any given evening ("Confused tourists, terrified at finding themselves in the midst of gunfire, are soon relieved to find out that they have wandered onto the set of gritty new movie and are hired as extras. 'We were just trying to find the Washington Monument,' says one").

But of course we are not crazy enough to actually drive around in DC for very long, preferring to leave that task to the professionals, who ARE crazy enough to do it, for an exorbitant fee. The particular bus line we chose for our tour has a unique system for ensuring the safety of its passengers while still allowing them full viewing access to all the sights. After you get on, they pull these bars down over the side of the bus, so that you are pretty much in a cage. This has the effect of making you feel as if you are in some sort of moving playpen, and it is very difficult to comply with all the signs admonishing you to "at no time put any part of your person outside the cage."

The narrators on these buses are very helpful. They wait until you get ON the bus -- which in our case took several minutes while we folded, hoisted, and stowed a rented wheelchair -- and are comfortably settled to tell you that the bus is not going where you want to go, and then they wait until you get OFF -- unfolding, unhoisting, and unstowing the wheelchair -- to tell you that, although it is still true that the bus is not going where you want to go, the bus CAN take you to where another bus can take you where you want to go. By the time you and your guests -- and the wheelchair -- have boarded for the second time, the other passengers are desperately wishing they had taken a different bus, or even visited a different city that day, such as Honolulu.

We later learned that our narrator had violated the Code of Narration Ethics, which states that tour narrators may not reveal to tourists that there is another bus coming, because should the tourists happen to miss that bus, and should it happen to be the very LAST bus for the day, everyone would be in very big trouble. So although the last bus runs at approximately 5:30, narrators are instructed to tell their riders that service ends at 1:00, thereby prompting a panicked rush for a bus at that time.

As it happened we did NOT miss the very last bus, which is lucky, because we would still be wandering about in DC looking for our car, and you would not be reading this right now. We did, however, wander about once we were IN our car, preferring to take what my father has always called the scenic route, which fortunately for us did not involve any areas that ended up on the evening news.

But there is always tomorrow.