Susan and I spent most of last week in Washington, DC. For me this was mostly work – this year’s North American Drupalcon was in DC so I spent Wednesday-Friday in conference sessions from 9AM to 6:30 every night, then entertaining in the evenings. The conference was pretty good overall – I learned a lot and added a bunch of stuff to my todo list. Friday night I got together with a couple of old friends from college and had a blast catching up, hanging in a funky bar/restaurant that was Marvin Gaye themed and had a southern/belgian fusion menu (no typos there!). Saturday was my 42nd birthday and despite nursing a miserable cold Susan and I tromped all over the mall, visiting an exhibition of 15th century Dutch painting in the national gallery (cityscapes, really great stuff), an outdoor sculpture garden and skating rink, the National Botanical Garden, the Jefferson Memorial (which I had never been to), Franklin D Roosevelt Memorial Park, the Lincoln Memorial, and finally the Korean War Memorial. Sadly we ran out of gas at this point and never made it to the WWII Memorial which I had also hoped to see. We finished off with a poor choice for dinner by me. Susan doesn’t like chinese food so we never get to eat it, so for my birthday dinner I chose chinese. Sadly Washington DC has no good chinese food and the place we went to pretty much stunk. Despite this I had a great day. It was the first time I had been to DC since roughly ’93 and outside of the mall area it was all new to me. We walked pretty much everywhere and by and large I really liked the city.

I’ll also mention that we took Amtrak both ways. It was pricier than flying, we got stuck for 2 hours in a broken down train, and the bathrooms were disgusting, but I’d still choose to travel that way again in a heartbeat, it is so much more comfortable than flying.

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