The two of you who missed this column last week should know I was not on vacation. I was locked in a conference in the nation's capital.
I think I earned a couple vacations for this trip. I love Washington DC, but not the getting there. It's hard work.
From Pike county there aren't many options. You can't fly. Can't take a train. You're limited to jumping in the car and finding the shortest route to Interstate 81. Four hundred fifty miles and a couple heart attacks later you're in sight of the Washington Monument pulling into the hotel.
That's after travelling all evening on highways designed to carry traffic at 75-80 miles an hour into a city built on a layout designed to carry traffic at the speed of horse. If you're not lost when you find your hotel you're at least dizzy.
Washington DC is a maze of circles and diagonals and straight lines all emanating from center. It is a miracle anyone ever found anything there before Google Maps. The best thing you can do once you get to DC is hide the keys until it's time to go home. Take the subway or the bus. Get an Uber.
Not that we had a chance to do any sightseeing. We were packed for two days, Wednesday and Thursday, in a conference of government grant recipients and government grant makers talking about grants. There are a lot of opportunities coming if we are ready for them.
Some of the opportunities are brilliant. Some of them are baffling. The whole of them are a bit unreal. When the gathering ended late Thursday afternoon, my partner and I were about worn out with a night left in the hotel.
The great thing about Washington is there's always something worth experiencing and we settled quickly on the Immersive Vincent Van Gogh multimedia art exhibit. It was a quick Uber from the hotel to the exhibition hall in a repurposed shopping center.
Somehow getting lost in the high tech re-framing of Van Gogh's world of colors and light brought us back to reality. The multi-sensory extravaganza was invigorating compared to the agency speak drab of the previous 48 hours. And it only took about an hour.
You can't see anything you want to see in DC in an hour. Perfect for a random Thursday evening. That gave us plenty of time for tapas at a small Brazilian jazz club down the street from our hotel. If you're going to be in an international city like Washington, you should take advantage of the many options.
It was a fast trip to DC, it was a full trip. Drive there Tuesday, meetings Wednesday and Thursday, drive back Friday. For those of you wondering about the actual time it takes, I can report that it's possible to leave a DC hotel at 7:30am and be home in Pike county at 2:30pm.
But I wouldn't necessarily recommend it.