Traveling: Foregoing Mardi Gras for a trip to Northern Virginia

On the Saturday before Mardi gras, I usually take a trip to the bayou for the Krewe of Apollo parade in Lockport. However, this year Cristina and I didn’t go. Cristina’s sister will be moving to the DC area and wanted to check out some neighborhoods that she had been looking at online. She invited us along due to her husband being in Afghanistan. So the question became: DC or Mardi gras?

We choose DC. Don’t get me wrong, we love Mardi Gras (Cristina more than I; I’m not a huge crowd fan), but to see our nation’s capital in a slow tourist season was too good of an opportunity to pass up. So on Saturday we packed our bags and started the drive. Then the rain came. I wasn’t sure we would get out of New Orleans East.

If it was raining cats and dogs, these drops were tigers and wolves. It was the kind of rain that you repeatedly check your windshield wipers to see if they will go faster. I don’t think I drove faster than twenty-five miles per hour. Luckily, it became manageable once we got to Slidell. The worst was over, or so we thought.

I’m a bayou boy. Rain, I can handle. However, the next day Cristina informs me there is snow on the radar and we are heading right to it. I’m ready to call bulls… thinking it’s March, winter is over. Then we get to northeast Tennessee. It’s a freaking winter wonderland. The roads were passable and actually had no ice on them at all. It made for some beautiful scenery. Then we get to an area where there is no snow on the ground. That was because it was still falling from the sky. You know when the Millennium Falcon hits hyper speed all the stars form white lines? That is what it was like driving though. It was probably easy driving conditions if you live in this area, but it scared the daylights out of me. Again the roads weren’t very icy and where they were I just slowly followed a big truck and let him break it apart.

DC has been a lot more peaceful than the trip. We spent most of Lundi Gras driving through the neighborhoods that my future in-laws might move. At night, we went into DC. I, for one, think the monuments are the best seen at night. Beautifully, and in the Korean War Memorial’s case, hauntingly lit, the monuments take on a more solemn and respectful aspect. Cristina, ever the social studies teacher, took plenty of pictures of monuments but also plenty of the cabinet buildings. No stealing pictures from Google images for her: