Visit to Alexandria

Day 70, June 10, 2011, Visit to Alexandria

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Route from College Park, MD to Alexandria, VA

Best Moment – Having someone else do the driving during rush hour traffic into and across the city was really nice.  The city bus has its last stop at the entrance to the campground, the office sells tickets to the metro, and they advise you of exactly where to go and when to change trains.

Worst Moment – It is still hot here, but the thundershower just after we got back did cool things off a bit.  I heard, on the news, that there is going to be a break in the heat and humidity, which will be a good thing.

This campground is really something.  They have a café, two swimming pools, the best-stocked camping/RV store I’ve seen, and a bus stop.  We ate breakfast at the café; got tickets for the Metro, and think we’ve found the right screen door handle to replace ours with the broken spring.

After breakfast, we headed to the bus and Metro bound for Alexandria.  We’ve seen the monuments and hadn’t spent any time in Alexandria.  It is quite a historic and quaint suburb of DC.  We walked through the Lee house, peeked in the windows of Gadsby’s Tavern and searched for the Old Presbyterian Meeting House. (I’m afraid that we weren’t too successful on the last.)

It was fun to see the cobblestone and brick paved roads and walkways.  We also spent some time walking through the Torpedo Factory.  That is a waterfront building with about 70 small art galleries and artist studios.  It was well air conditioned and felt good to spend some time there looking at the stuff, even though we would probably never use any of it. From the name of it and the torpedoes around the building probably used to be used to make torpedoes.

Mostly, we ate and drank.  We had appetizers at an Irish Pub, cupcakes at a specialty cupcake store, and drinks at a hotel lobby.  Contrary to what other bloggers may try to suggest, I really only ate ONE, not TWO, cupcakes.  Neita had one with chocolate pinot noir frosting, I had one that had lemon curd – they both were really good. 

We got back to Ruby just before the rain came and I spent a lot of time trying to figure out how to leave here tomorrow.  Hopefully, I picked a good route, and hopefully we’ll have a place to stay.  We didn’t because the campground in Freeland, MD only accepted reservations for two-nights, they were booked, but told us to call to see if there had been any cancellations.  If not, there was an overflow area that was on a first come basis.