It's Day Twenty-Two, and my everything hurts. We spent the day not taking advantage of public transportation and, instead, walking an estimated 15 miles around Washington, DC. My toes, stuffed back into shoes after two and a half weeks of freedom, are in pain from being squashed up to their neighbors. My legs are so heavy I fear that if I put step down off this bed they'll crash through the floor, plummeting me through to the center of the earth and beyond. My eyes burn with the pain of being open, my brain is over-stuffed: we saw and did far too many new things today.
I'm not going to blarg about it. Instead, I offer you two vignettes which hopefully give an incomplete picture of what our day was like, why we are exhausted, and why we completely lost control of our sanity at the end. There will be more tomorrow, and even more the day after that.
* Mike and I step off the tall, tall escalator and look around. Everything is made of stone. Everything is big, and everything is at least a little bit famous. Most things start with the word "National." These buildings stretch for miles in all directions, and all around us people in business gear rush, rush, rush to get to their crucially important destination. "There," says Mike. "That's something over there."
* Can you see the Washington Monument from space? I myself have never tried it, but I can't imagine being so far away from D.C. that the gigantic white obelisk is not looming somewhere in your view. If we knew what we were looking for, I'm sure we could see it from our own patio. Everywhere we walk in the city it is there, taller than we can believe. We finally give in to its gravity and climb up to put our hands on it, to look up and to be glad we have feet firmly on the ground. A woman in the crowd gasps "There it is!" She had, I suppose, not noticed it before.
Today we listened to: "Umbrella" by Rihanna blasting from the speakers of a supposedly world-famous ice cream shoppe. Simultaneously, the sound of our brains coming unhinged.
Mystery words: "Washington Monument, Lincoln Memorial, Jefferson Memorial, WWII Memorial, Vietnam War Memorial, Korean War Memorial, Arlington National Cemetery, National Museum of Natural History, National Archives, Smithsonian Castle..." and "She's a witch?"
Mike didn't blarg today, but read his 363rd daily story. The experiment is almost over!: astoriedyear.blogspot.com
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