DC, day 1: 19 June 2007
Started: 2007-07-12 17:22:08
Submitted: 2007-07-12 17:30:02
Visibility: World-readable
Like my vacation in London last fall, I wrote details of my vacation and notes of things to see in the same little black book. These offline changelogs and notes are transcribed here.
On Tuesday, Kiesa dropped me off at Longmont's Roosevelt Park-and-Ride, where I caught the Bolt into work for my last partial day before vacation. I packed my office and solved one of the insidious cable set-top-box problems I experienced over the past few weeks. (Unfortunately, it's not one whose solution will have great transferable meaning.) I packed everything in my cube, labeled it Blue 10, and caught the 1335 AB bus to the airport. I arrived in front of the Frontier check-in counter a minute before Kiesa, who drove straight down from Greeley. We checked our bags and breezed through security. We contemplated supper (it was a bit after 15:00 and our plane left at 16:40, too early to eat at DIA but too late to eat at DCA) and eventually traveled to Concourse C to get a bagel sandwich at the new Einstein Bagels there. DIA changed the train announcements and music since my last flight out (Boston last month); we thought it was a distinct disimprovement.
Our flight to DCA left a few minutes late. Due to thunderstorms over Kansas, we went significantly south, flying over OKC before turning north-east to head back towards Washington. We hit some storms over West Virginia and performed the fantastic river visual approach into DCA — following the Potomac River south to the airport, avoiding restricted airspace over DC, with plenty of sharp turns as we descended. Had I been paying enough attention, we could have gotten seats on the left side of the plane, in which case we could have seen DC itself. As it was, I got a good view of the Pentagon as we descended.
We waited to claim our bags and caught the blue or orange line Metro one stop north to Crystal City and found our Raddison hotel two blocks away. They gave us a smoking room and insisted that was what we reserved (which was really Travelocity's fault) and didn't have anywhere to move us that night but said they'd see what they could do in the morning.
