What wouldn’t you do as a backpacker in order to save a bit of money… Ok, maybe that is a bit too philosophic now, but it basically hits the nail on the head. We spent a lot of time thinking about our planned drive from West to East and decided to keep that for our next trip. Instead we planned to fly in order to have two more weeks on the West Coast. After a bit of research, patience and even more research we found indeed the most cheapest and best flight ever from San Diego to Washington D.C. for only $169! Just as a comparison, you can easily find the same flight for around $700! That’s why we instantly booked the flight. And the best part at the end: an overnight flight in order to directly get rid of the jetlag! (3 hours time difference between west and east) Of course, with this price, there must be negative site, because we had a 1 hour stopover in Phoenix, Arizona and a 4 hour transfer in Dallas, Texas (Yeehaa Texas!!!). Not too bad, we believed, because for the first stopover we don’t need to get off the plane and could just continue sleeping and at a big airport like Dallas, there should be a sleeping option somewhere. Let’s call it what it was: no chance! We had to leave the plane in Phoenix due to crew changing and the benches in Dallas are for normal grown people impossible to sleep on! (with armrests between each chair :-/).
But we wouldn’t have come so far, if we were worried about stuff like that, so we used every chance to get a bit of sleep. This is mainly true for Tobi, who somehow acquired the ability to sleep everywhere (in Dallas, it was on the floor in front of our gate in cuddle position with the backpack including valuables under the loud TV and in between the cleaning staff. 🙂 ) Kerstin wasn’t that good, but she still got a few hours of sleep in the plane and thus we arrived a bit exhausted but alive in Washington D.C. just to run against a humid wall of heat. Also here was a heat wave of more than 35°C (95°F), which due to the high humidity reminded us a bit of the Queensland summer (East coast of Australia).
But we are used to that and so we directly headed to our host Peter. You might remember Sue – the girlfriend of Bruce from Jackson/Yellowstone – who connected us to her brother and an accommodation. And now, listen! 20 minutes walking distance to the White House in (for urban situations) huge 3-floor house and we got the whole 3rd floor for us alone! When we arrived, Peter was almost on the way to his work (he works for the newsagency Reuters as a sports journalist), but had some time left to welcome us and make us feel like home!
After a short nap we made our way to explore the area and Washington impressed us quite a bit. An extremely relaxed and open-minded international atmosphere, which is probably due to all the embassies and therefore international citizens. Also, Washington D.C. is a number one holiday destination for American families visiting their capital (which due to the school holidays was rather bad for us). But there are a few more characteristics: the native population is mainly black (Martin Luther King says hello), which is not only pretty cool (“Afro-Americans” are super nice and friendly), but also leads to funny occasions. One example: Obama is feeling really good in his “community”, whereas republican presidents try to stay away from D.C. Peter told us Obama often goes in different restaurants in D.C., but George W. Bush took 30 weeks (yes weeks not days) holidays in Texas per year. Another even weirder thing in D.C. is the election system. At the time of the foundation of the USA, Washington D.C. was founded as property of the Congress under their power. At that time no one believed that people really want to move to D.C., why D.C. didn’t get any electoral rights (the delegates do not officially live in Washington but in their respective electoral districts). The people in
Washington are nowadays allowed to participate the presidential elections, but they don’t have representatives in the Senate or in the House of Representatives (ok, there is one, but she is not allowed to vote^^). If you consider now that Washington D.C. has 600,000 citizens and therefore more than 3 states in USA and it is on the 17th position of the regions with the highest influence on the national output, you don’t understand the world anymore. Of course, the citizen fight against that, but a change of D.C. to a state would mean a change of the constitution and therefore needs a majority of 2/3 in the Congress, which fails due to the republicans. You might ask yourself why a big party like the republicans are against such a basic democratic legitimization (of course there are voters to collect). But now the deciding point is coming: as already mentioned, the majority of the citizen is black and which party is preferentially elected by black people? Right, NOT the conservative republicans! 🙂 But that is the way the democracy in America works…
So far so good about D.C. and as already mentioned, we walked the same day of our arrival through the area, to the White House, a monument of World War II and to the Lincoln Memorial. In order to get rid of the residual tiredness, we went earlier to bed after chatting with Peter. He borrowed us his bikes for the next days, which made the exploration of the city way easier. And so, we went to a lot of museums, monuments and public buildings of the city. Our personal highlights were the National Mall, the Air and Space Museum, the Capitol, the National Library and the ride to the top of the Washington Memorial. For the last one, you should wait in line from 7am in order to receive the free tickets, which we did and went up the same day together with Peter to watch the sunset over D.C.
In addition to all the sights, there were a few more highlights. Peter took us to a premiere of Jason Segel’s new movie “End of the Tour” including a discussion after the movie together with Jason Segel. No idea, who that is? Small tip: Marshall from “How I met your Mother”. Also Peter took us to a nice little trip to the Great Falls nearby (which surprisingly impressed us after all the big waterfalls on the west coast).
The rest is better told by pictures than by words and that was our 5-day visit in Washington. We took the bus north to The Biiiiiiig Apple to New York. But this (by the way completely crazy) story is another one.