details

Of the states we crossed during our long journey, I would probably visit Ohio again, and maybe Wyoming, perhaps Nevada and Utah. Ohio’s pretty laid back, with good roads, and a nifty song. Who can beat the nifty song? “Cleveland rocks!”

When we finally arrived at Son and Linh’s place, we were pretty darn tired. When Linh said that she was going to live above a violin shop, I didn’t quite know what to make of it. But the store is very interesting. The shop actually handcrafts (and thus takes custom orders for) violin, violas, cellos, guitars, banjos, mandolins…that’s all I managed to gather from looking into it. It is pretty nifty. The apartment itself had…presents for us. The previous tenants didn’t take everything with them in their move, which proved to be both awkward and disgusting. They left things like an air conditioning unit (don’t know whether it works…don’t really wanna try it out), curtains for what seems to have been a little girl’s bedroom (pink curtains), and miscellaneous kitchen stuffs, including a loaf of bread?! Nastiness.

That night, Linh said that we still had more driving to do, that we needed to drive to Washington DC to meet up with her friend. I thought she was crazy! But I understand now. We didn’t actually drive to DC that night.; we unpacked as much as we could, ate ramen, and slept on the floor. Had we gone to DC, we would have had beds waiting for us, food, and good company…well, an extra night of it. ☺

DC, by or on Capital Hill, is a beautiful place to live. Linh’s friend explained to us that houses with a certain emblem are historically kept, to match the original color scheme and exterior, in exchange for a nice tax deduction. Although that may seem limiting, it keeps the neighborhood very uniform, in a good way. It promises that flowers are planted, kept, and blooming, and there were plenty of flowers in bloom. I think that Will would probably like taking a walk, photographing flowers as he went, and if he didn’t mind the humidity.

It is definitely more humid there. It’s not “Asia” humid, but the temperatures weren’t high yet. I kinda wanted to experience rain during my trip, just to feel the water, if it was warm or cold. I’ve written about this before, that the rain in southern China is actually warm and pleasant to walk through. So I’m curious. Unfortunately, my experience with rain there took the form of sudden thunderstorms, like God dumped a bucket of water. It came down fast, hard, and left just as suddenly. This was especially interesting on Pennsylvania’s 4-lane highways (two lanes each way), when a big rig driving the opposite direction along the center divider splashed a tidal wave of water onto us. You just see the water coming at you, and you KNOW you’re not going to get wet, but it still scares the CRAP out of you!

This post isn’t in chronological order, in case you haven’t noticed.

Visited Gabe and Janey in Baltimore, with the help of Son and Linh’s GPS (Baltimore freeways can be confusing) and a few calls to Gabe. We had a very nice dinner and dessert, where we caught up with a lot of news and life. They showed me, in the safety of their car, Baltimore at night. Johns Hopkins is a gorgeous campus, and Peabody is much smaller and in the middle of Baltimore than I had thought. Gabe also lent me a DVD of Battlestar Galactica, so I can begin to be hooked to the series as much as others have. ☺

The next day, Linh’s friend took us to a park in the middle of DC, where we read the words of Theodore Roosevelt engraved into huge solid slabs and hiked. Hiking…certainly isn’t the first thing that comes to mind, as a top activity to do at our nation’s capital, but it was good. The quotes were inspiring, and the foliage reminds me of what settlers probably saw when they traveled around the Potomac.