Our accommodation was definitely a change too, but not refreshingly so. After 4 days or so in a air conditioned hotel room in New Jersey, we were hit with high humidity and higher temperatures in the tent trailer. With no wind during the evenings, it was a sticky couple of days.
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| Some of our neighbours in the Greenway. |
The campsite itself was interesting too and kind of fits with the culture of Washington - accessible to everyone. Nestled amongst suburbs close to the heart of Washington is a park known as the Greenway where anyone can camp for $16 per night (no power or water). This is quite a change as far as North American campsites go and certainly an oddity to be so close to a city.
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| Paige, Ash, Megan at The Lincoln Memorial |
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| Jill and Ash at the Washington Tower |
The reason that it seems to fit with the Washington culture is that when we drove in to park, we found FREE parking and admission to the Smithsonian museums was also FREE! We visited Lincoln's Memorial for ....FREE and wondered at the Washington Tower and what it must look like from the top. We could have found out too if we had arrived early enough as it was FREE to enter for the first 1000 visitors to get there. So much free entertainment was beginning to make me giddy with excitement after our pockets had been vacuumed clean in the money hungry 'Big Apple' just north.
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| Paige flys a plane at the Smithsonian. |
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| Strike a pose! |
We had a cunning plan for our brief stay in Washington and set about putting it into action soon after arriving - we were going to get the trailer fixed while we holidayed in Jamaica. How clever we thought, there won't be any pressure for the repairers as we could leave it for 10 or even 11 whole days to get it fixed. What we hadn't reckoned on was the sheer volume of work the repair places were doing at this time of year. After talking with a workshop boss and explaining our situation, I expected him to say, "Sure that will work well, you can collect it when you get back." He obviously didn't read the script in my head, because instead he said, "Too busy - can't fit you in for another month at least." Helpfully he offered another workshops number to call, which we did there and then, only to find that THEIR workload meant a 6 week waiting period for repairs!!
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| As if... |
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| Out the front of the Lincoln Memorial. |
With despair settling in, we were rescued by one of the workshop repair guys who quietly introduced us to our saviour and said ignore the boss, he wouldn't know, besides we were "in transit" and that meant we had priority needs. What a great guy. So leaving the trailer, we headed off to a hotel for our last night in Washington before Jamaica. Dad assured everyone that the swimming pool would be a great way to pass the afternoon - except that he got the wrong hotel - there was no pool at this one. Bugger. Luckily the rooms were so fancy (apparently $400 each per night full rate) that the kids didn't mind a lack of swimming pool. Phew.
The car had to be left at another parking lot which had been booked online the week before. There were a couple of small problems with it though; firstly it wasn't actually at the address the GPS showed which led to some soul and car park searching. Eventually when I did find it, I couldn't get in because I need a token from the hotel which I couldn't get until I showed my printed booking - problem #2. I didn't have a PRINTED booking, just the original version on my laptop. Luckily the gay concierge was more accepting of an electronic copy than the not gay concierge was and I got my token. The taxi ride back to my hotel made it embarrassingly obvious how easy it was to drive from one to the other if you knew where to go.
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| Crowne Plaza room ($400 p.night!?) |
For dinner that night it was Thai food at a nearby restaurant. BIG servings meant much leftover food.
The next day the hotel shuttle made life easy for the airport run.
We stayed one more night at a different hotel in Washington, not so upmarket, and again NOT GPS friendly. The first attempt took us nearly back to where we started from after driving within spitting distance of the hotel. The second attempt was only saved from the same fate by some irregular driving and calls of, "Sorry we're from Ontario!" in Australian accents.
Now, 11 days after dropping our trailer at the repair workshop and having tried three times to contact them over the past week to ask how we could get our trailer from their closed business on a Saturday, we decided to just drive over a chance it. Sure enough the place was closed - nobody to be seen. But our trailer was sitting where we had left it with a number on it. Great - fixed! So we hooked up and drove off, to another state. And remember the part about Washington's culture - the repairs were FREE!
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