This past week I was in Washington D.C. with August’s 8th grade class. It was extremely fun, wet, exhausting, and well worth it. It is not my intent to give a complete rundown of our itinerary and impressions of each location we visited. However, there are a few things I did want to highlight.
In the first entry I talked about Mount Vernon, George Washington’s tomb and August’s birthday. I am going to skip over the Smithsonian, the meals, Monticello, and instead want to make mention of the weather because it was sort of a big deal on the trip, so much so that it affected our itinerary.
The first day, the longest day, starting off with our arrival in Washington D.C. early in the morning after an overnight flight, then on to Mount Vernon, then lunch, then the Smithsonian museums, well, it was supposed to end with some sightseeing and visits to monuments and memorials.
About dinner time that first night the rain came. And came down hard.
So hard in fact that we all got flash flood alerts on our phones. Imagine a bus full of 8th graders not used to the east coast torrential thunderstorms who are all very tired at the end of basically two days of no to little sleep. On edge? Yes, and that phone alert didn’t help much.
The rain itself wasn’t the problem so much as the lightning. When we get thunderstorms here there are a few lightning strikes an hour, not multiple (and very close) strikes per minute.
That evening’s schedule was cancelled and we went to the hotel with the hopes of getting to the monuments and memorials the next evening.
Guess what? About dinner time the same style of storm arrived putting a damper on our plans again.
The third night was already full with a different activity so there was no time for sight-seeing. We had one more evening, and you can’t go to Washington D.C. and not visit the Lincoln Memorial, so the plan was rain or shine, we would be hitting the town.
On the final evening, which started out nicely, we finally got to hit a few of the memorials, starting wit the World War 2 Memorial. This one was new since I had last been to Washington D.C. 20(ish) years ago and I was looking forward to checking it out.
We then walked over to the Vietnam Memorial, and that is when the weather started to turn. By the time we got to the Lincoln Memorial the rain started again. Fortunately it wasn’t the same type of heavy thunderstorm we have enjoyed previously.
The evening was cut short again, not making it to the Korean War or Jefferson memorials that we had planned. Instead we made it to Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial and it was simply dumping rain by the time we got there. Even if you had rain gear and an umbrella you were getting wet.
In total we spent 5 days and 4 nights in Washington D.C., and it rained every night, and sometimes during the day. While being from Seattle we weren’t afraid of getting wet, these types of storms were foreign to us. Scary? Maybe a little bit. More bothersome than anything. Certainly an inconvenience.
Such is life.