A sort of home
It would be inappropriate to leave DC out of the story of my adventures, but it’s impossible to know exactly where to fit it in. It’s even inappropriate to refer to it as DC, since I don’t think I actually set foot in the District during the entire month, but I can’t help it. Dulles is considered one of the “DC” airports despite being tucked well out of the way in northern Virginia, and I was much closer to IAD than DC itself. Which worked out pretty well, considering the airport was the landmark I interacted with the most.
A month in DC, and the only pictures I have are of the airport. This is telling.
I’ve been long acquainted with DC, and in the regrettable manner one takes with old friends I did not take the time to experience DC in any serious way on this trip. I did, however, live there intimately in the time that I did have. Like every other city on the list I didn’t stay there for more than one or two nights at a stretch, but the time I spent there was unlike the time in any other city; this was home base, it was where all my stuff was, and it was where I took time to regroup and breathe. It was the place where I more or less knew what was going on. It was a place where I knew I had a lift to and from the airport, I could swap stories with my sister, and I could catch my breath. DC was there for me.
This was tagged quickly as a CRJ-700 in the “name that plane” game my brother played with me over the course of the month.
I felt the seasons turn in DC as I bounced in and out. I experienced ice and threats of snow and skin-baringly warm sun. I smelled thunderstorms in the air, and I was drenched by spring rain. I watched the cherry trees bloom and start to change into their summer garb. I became intimately familiar with IAD, to the point where I started to recognise the TSA employees who patted me down from trip to trip.
DC doesn’t have time to worry whether I’m paying attention, but it has always been relentlessly good to me. I talked about the yoga experience I had, and while I was thinking about how very good that was I realised that the last time I belonged to a studio in the DC area was an aikido dojo, and that I still haven’t found a better place for aikido. I know if I’d started yoga here (rather than elsewhere) that no place would ever be the same.
“Big old Pratt and Whitneys,” my brother said when commenting on this shot, taken during a lengthy but visually stunning delay on the way to PDX.
I didn’t experience DC as richly as I should have when I lived here. I was in college, and saturated with the college life atmosphere. But the communities in DC are fantastic, full of interesting people with lives they can’t talk about and plenty of conversation to cover up what they can’t say. It’s a city that’s friendly to cyclists and runners, and isn’t jealous in the slightest. I loved getting to live there again, however fleeting and transiently, and I’m reminded of why I used to say that if I had to live in the States, I’d live in DC. The culture and atmosphere are unlike anywhere else I’ve been, and while it’s a lovely place to visit you don’t realise what a gem it is until you’ve lived here. Even if it’s just one-night stays sprinkled through a month of madness.
It is funny being ‘near’ rather than in a landmark place. I was really more accurately ‘near’ Portland, since it was Hillsboro that was where I spent most of the time in the US. Sometimes with work travel you can be ‘near’ somewhere while being at the geographical centre, merely because all you’ve done is attend a workshop in a conference hall, and never actually visited the streets.
IAD would seem to be a smart base for a number of extrinsic reasons. I am sure it’s a major airport for commuters, with a lower population of holiday travellers.
It’s the other way around actually… DCA is expensive to fly into and doesn’t serve as many destinations, and is smaller. So commuters tend to use it (highly convenient to DC), while the tourists use IAD with proper international infrastructure and a couple of mini hubs for various airlines.
The location was picked solely because my sister was there; I was lucky that it was a smart location for flying. There’s a lot to be said for being 10 minutes away from a major airport when one is flying every day.