DC Trip: Day 5

The last day in DC was spent wandering the city.

DC's layout is kind of like what you would get if you took a monkey with down syndrome and made him play Sim City. Like, there are some streets that are one-way, and then you reach a certain point, and the street is still one-way, but suddenly in the opposite direction. There are also areas where you think it's a neat grid system with simple letters and numbers, and then some wildcard street pops up just to throw you for a loop. Like, you're driving past A Street, B Street, C Street, and suddenly the street names are like Jimmy Ave, Patrick Blvd, and you're like, Where the fuck is D Street?

Also, there are no places to park. I mean, there are streets and you can drive your car to where you need to go. But you can't park the car anywhere. I'm not sure how that works; I assume you just roll your car along to where you want to go, and then you jump out of the car or something and let it roll along since you can't park it. Hey, I didn't make the rules. Ask the down syndrome monkey.

The drivers in DC love to honk their horns. All the time. For any reason. I don't know if it's maybe an East Coast thing, but in Houston, when someone honks their horn, it usually means something along the lines of, "Warning! Some shit's about to happen!"

But not in DC.

In DC, people honk for no real apparent reason. I think they have conversations with their car horns. Like someone honks to say, "Good morning! How are you?" and then someone else responds by honking, "I'm fine, thank you. Do you have any Grey Poupon?"

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We visited the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History, which is where they have those dinosaur fossils and monkey-man evolution diagram things and that one famous elephant at the door with the ears flapped back and trunk raised. There were little kids all over the place from some school field trip or something.

I bumped into a couple of kids ooh-ing and ahh-ing at a fossilized bone of a Brontosaurus's leg on display.

I went up to them and told them that the bone wasn't real, that it was just plastic.

KID #1: Nah uh! This is a real dinosaur bone!

ME: Have you ever seen a bone? It's white. That thing is too brown and shiny to be a bone. It's plastic!

KID #2: Nah uh! It's a bone -- it's just old!

ME: Dinosaurs aren't real. Everybody knows God made the world in six days. How can there be dinosaurs billions of years before man? Everybody knows this stuff is plastic and fake. Dinosaurs aren't real; just like Santa and the Easter Bunny.

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Had dinner at a riverfront restaurant and flew out the morning after.