28 Jul 2002
A week later and the dust has finally settled. It feels like the last week has been consumed with unpacking boxes, shuttling cars and frantic shopping for the bare essentials that ended up in storage.
We spend the first night in DC with my brother, and then drove over to the apartment building bright and early the following morning. We were treated to a glorious summer day in DC, which like most of them, consisted of 950F heat and approx. 70% humidity. This is the main reason why so many people respond with “I could never live there!” when we told them we were moving to DC (the other is fear of gun shots), but we still love it.
Amazingly, the apartment building exceed our expectations (and we have very high expectations). It’s new, clean, well appointed and in a great location, just off Connecticut Avenue, less than 3 miles north of the White House. We can see the Washington monument from our window and have a plethora of interesting shops and restaurants just round the corner. Better yet, the nearest Metro (underground / subway) station is 4 minutes from here.
Our cars arrived just a couple of days after we did, much sooner than expected. We spent the morning searching the city for a large spot of unoccupied tarmac (no easy task, believe me), so that the guy could unload the transporter. He was a little late in our rendezvous, having being woken in the middle of the night by the noise of his truck being rammed by another, practically ripping one of the cars off the back in the process. We got to examine the results the next day. The car had been chained down to the platform and as a result most of its underside had been ripped away where the chains were attached. The cars was, needless to say, a write off. Oh to be a fly on the wall when the customer received that one.
Only in the past couple of days have we found time to actually start to explore this amazing city. So far it hasn’t disappointed. We took a walking tour of the Mall on Wednesday, with yours truly acting as a tour guide (ironic but true). Later, after taking receipt of our bicycles from Mr. UPS, we spent an afternoon cycling through Rock Creek Park and downtown.
In addition to the countless museums, memorials and attractions, Washington is blessed with many miles of trails - cycling seems to be a very popular pastime here. For example, it was possible for me to cycle the 10 miles from our apartment to downtown Alexandria without using a road once.
The plan is still for us to go on to Australia in about 3 months, assuming we don’t get too enamoured with this city first. The visa madness continues with no sign of abating, but hopefully they’ll come to their senses soon or later and realise that Lynn and I have something to offer the country!
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