Paella, Ford's Theater and Georgetown

On Tuesday, October 7, Mary Joy was feeling much better, but we were in no hurry to get up.  When we did, the weather didn’t look too promising.  It felt like it could rain at any moment.

We went out and down Rhode Island Avenue, to look inside the Cathedral of St. Matthew the Apostle.  It was very unassuming from the outside, with a plain red stone façade.  On the inside, there were a lot of mosaics, as in the National Shrine, but this was a much smaller church—smaller, I think, than our Cathedral of St. Paul in Minnesota. 

We went back to our hotel and checked out, leaving our luggage there for now.  Then we walked down to the Farragut North Metro station.  Right there was a CVS store, where I bought an umbrella, since, relying on weather.com, we hadn’t brought any on this trip.  We took the Red Line to Gallery Place—Chinatown and exited onto 7^th Street, south of Verizon Center.  Outside the station, Mary Joy bought an umbrella from a street vendor, for much less than I had payed for mine.  We ended up having to use them only a few times during the day, and not for long, but use them we did.  We walked a block or so down 7^th and arrived at Jaleo just after the doors opened, at 11:30.

We had seen Chef Jose Andres on his PBS TV series about Spain and its food.  This was the first of his many restaurants in Washington, basically a tapas place, with a hip, contemporary vibe, but when

the waitress (herself from Galicia), handed us the special paella menu, that’s what we decided to have, along with sangria.   It was cooked, for two persons, in a large skillet, in which it was served at the table.  It was good, and Mary Joy liked it a lot, though I think I’ve had better.  I think we had a flan for dessert.

Afterwards, we walked down E Street the three blocks to 10^th Street and Ford’s Theater, which has been restored as a working theater, though the basement is taken up with an exhibit dedicated to the history of Abraham Lincoln’s presidency, leading up to the evening of Good Friday, April 14^th, 1865, when Lincoln and his wife sat in the front right box of this theater--now, as that night, festooned with flags and a portrait of George Washington.  During the performance of the comedy Our American Cousin, the actor John Wilkes Booth, not acting in that performance but knowing the theater well and being well-known there, went up the stairs, entered the president’s box and shot him in the back of the head.  Then he leaped down to the stage, shouted “Sic semper tyrannis!” (“Thus always to tyrants!”) and ran off, before anyone could react.  He had left his horse with a stagehand out in the alley.  Lincoln was carried across the street to the Peterson house, where he died.  On April 26^th, Booth was trapped and shot in a burning barn in northern Virginia.

The basement exhibit is very well done and provides you with a strong sense of the historical context of Lincoln’s administration and the end of his life.  The theater itself is a theater, like any other of the time, updated in some ways for modern stage productions. 

We went across the street to the Peterson House, but there was a wait to get in, because, I think, someone was preparing to do some filming there.  So, after meeting a mother and son from Lakeville, Minnesota (where Mary Joy’s previous job had been) in the line, we went on to catch the DC Circulator to Georgetown.

The DC Circulator bus is the simplest (one every ten minutes) and cheapest ($1) route from downtown Washington (the Yellow Line) or Dupont Circle (the Blue Line) to Georgetown, the oldest, quaintest and most expensive part of Washington.  The Potomac River trading village of George Town (named after the British King George II) dated from 1751, long before anyone dreamed of a major capital city just downstream.  Senator John F. Kennedy lived there (and proposed to Jacqueline Bouvier in Martin’s Tavern) before moving to the White House.  Georgetown is that sort of place.  It successfully avoided having a Metrorail station there, so the only way to get there by public transit is on the bus.

We walked to K Street (famous as the street where lobbyists have their offices), caught the Circulator and rode it across Downtown and Foggy Bottom, then crossed Rock Creek into Georgetown, getting off at the Waterfront, a pleasant but rather deserted park along the Potomac, with views downstream past the famous (or infamous) Watergate complex to the low, white bulk of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts.  To get from the park to the rest of Georgetown you have to pass under an expressway, U.S. 29, and climb a hill to M Street, the main shopping street.  There is a walking trail on the towpath of the old Chesapeake and Ohio Canal, but we decided not to walk it.  Instead, we looked at the Old Stone House from the street and from its garden.  It is a museum, but not open on Mondays.  From the outside, it is exactly as advertised, an old stone house.  By now, it was time for a mid-afternoon Kaffee und Kuchen, as the Germans call it.  Lonely Planet strongly recommended Baked and Wired, a

storefront with two parallel counters, on the left the “Baked” part, specializing in cupcakes, though we ended up with cookies instead.  If you go through a door to the right, you come to the “Wired” part, where you get your caffeine fix.  The sun had finally (though temporarily) broken out, so we sat at a table outside with our (delicious) coffee and cookies.  At the next table was a New Zealand woman named Hillary, who when we told her we weren’t sure what to do in Georgetown, strongly recommended Dumbarton Oaks, both the house and gardens.  So we walked the eleven blocks north up 31^st Street, through a very pleasant neighborhood of 19^th-century houses and rowhouses, and crossed R Street to Dumbarton Oaks.

The oldest part of the house dates from around 1801.  For a while in the 1820s it was the residence of Vice President John C. Calhoun.  However, the house and gardens only reached their current size and state after the property was bought by the diplomat Robert Woods Bliss and his wife Mildred in 1920.  The main gate on R Street is the entrance to the gardens.  Since it was already around 4:30 and the museum would close at 5:30, while the gardens would be open until 6, we first went around the corner into the house, for which there is no admission charge.  A helpful docent showed us the Music Room, with various works of art, including a painting of the Visitation by El Greco and a madonna and child statue by Tilman Riemenschneider.  That room was the site of the world premier of Stravinsky’s Dumbarton Oaks Concerto, commissioned by Mildred Bliss in honor of their 30^th wedding anniversary in 1938.  After the Blisses gave Dumbarton Oaks to Harvard University in 1940, as a museum and research institute, it became the site of the Washington Conversations on International Peace and Security Organization, better known as the Dumbarton Oaks Conference, which provided the basic framework for the United Nations.

 

We then toured the extensive and impressive collection of pre-Columbian art—Maya, Aztec, Inca and other, followed by the smaller collection of Byzantine art and some Roman art, including floor mosaics and a nice metal horse.

Then we went out and back around the corner to the gardens.  Admission is $8 for adults but $5 for those (like me) over 60.  We followed the self-tour route in the brochure, which wanders around all the various terraces and eventually back to the entrance.  It was pleasant, though not the most wonderful garden we’ve ever been in.  Around 5:50, a handbell was rung, repeatedly, to warn visitors that the gardens were about to close, so we rushed the last part of the self-tour, and walked back down 31^st Street to M Street, where we caught the Circulator (Blue Line) almost to Dupont Circle.

We had dinner again at Afterwords: Mary Joy had the fish tacos while I had the pork tacos, again very, very good.

Then we went to the Hotel Rouge and picked up our luggage, and came back to Dupont Circle to pick up the Red Line to Metro Center, where we changed to the Silver Line for the long run out to Wiehle-Reston.  I thought that our Smartrip cards had probably used up all their credit, but that turned out not to be true, probably because this last trip wasn’t during peak hours.  All-in-all we did very well with Smartrip—from the end of the Silver Line in and back and three days wandering around Washington, including two rides on the DC Circulator, for a total of $20 apiece, much less than it would have cost us for taxis.

 Rather than continue on the local bus to Dulles, we spent $5 apiece to take the Washington Flyer Silver Line Express bus directly to the airport, where we called our hotel (the Fairfield Inn Dulles-Sterling) and after a little trouble finding the right gate, took their shuttle to the hotel, checking in around 9:30 p.m.  It’s a pleasant place to stay, but we were in bed within the hour, since we had a 4 a.m. wakeup call: one of the reasons we chose this particular hotel was because their free airport shuttle service begins at 4:30, while some other hotels in the area don’t start theirs until 6.
We were out front at 4:30 a.m. and got to Dulles in plenty of time to catch our uneventful 6:30 flight to MSP.

National Mall

On Monday, October 6, we slept in a little.  We had a reservation for the 3 p.m. tour at the United States Capitol, and they suggested that we be there by 2:15, in case there was a crowd at security, but otherwise we had the whole day to do the normal tourist things that one does in Washington.

We walked the twenty minutes down 16^th Street to Lafayette Square.  On the way, we popped into St. John’s Episcopal Church, which was quaint but not particularly interesting.  There was a demonstration going on, with banners and signs, across Pennsylvania Avenue from the north side of the White House.  The demonstrators were chanting something about wanting Vietnam to leave Laos and Cambodia alone.  We crossed to the White House side of Pennsylvania Avenue.  There were metal police barriers in front of the seven-foot-high spiked metal fence.   A few days before, an armed man had scaled the fence and gotten into an open door, running past an unguarded stairway that led to the President’s family quarters, before being cornered in the East Room.  The head of the Secret Service had had to resign.  We hadn’t planned this trip early enough to get into an official White House tour, but we decided not to climb the fence and let ourselves in.

We went around to the south side of the White House, which required circumnavigating the Eisenhower Executive Office Building.  There were many more tourists on the south side than on the north.  The north side, fronting Pennsylvania Avenue, seems more businesslike.  The south side, with its broad lawn and little side gardens rolling down a lengthy hill, is more relaxed.

We backtracked a little and ended up going down 17^th Street to Constitution Avenue.  A demonstration of some sort had just ended, in front of the American Red Cross Building, involving a large Russian flag.  Presumably, it had involved the death two days earlier of a Swiss Red Cross worker in Ukraine, with the Russians and Ukrainians blaming each other for the shelling that killed him.

We crossed over into the gigantic National Mall, following the path from Constitution Gardens to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, the famous black Wall with 58,000 names of American war dead.  No one in either of our families died in Vietnam, nor did anyone we knew.  Yet, the sheer weight of all those names, made somewhat more manageable by their containment on that finite space, is a sad burden.  What for?

The Lincoln Memorial was the most crowded place on this whole trip, full of school kids and other tourists.  Lincoln himself, enshrined here like a god in a Greek temple, said best what it was all about, with his Second Inaugural Address on the north wall of the chamber and the Gettysburg Address on the south wall—two of the shortest major speeches in American history, yet probably the two greatest.  For him, saving the Union was a matter of saving the future of democracy itself, while slavery was the great sin for which we were punished by a horrible, horrible war.   One can question whether he was right, whether keeping the United States intact was worth over 600,000 military dead and a now-incalculable number of civilian casualties (at least in the tens of thousands).  Our character as a nation has been severely warped, for the long term and perhaps permanently, both by slavery and by the Civil War.  Was there really a danger that “government of the people, by the people, for the people” would “perish from the earth” if the South had been allowed to go its nasty, brutal way?  Maybe, maybe not.  Certainly, the end of slavery in the United States was a great, great good achieved by this disaster.  Our main difference with Europe and East Asia is that the World Wars touched us relatively lightly.  Our trauma came earlier.

We went back along the south side of the Reflecting Pool, past the World War II Memorial.  We missed the new Martin Luther King Memorial: I wasn’t sure where it was and I was beginning to worry about time.  It was a very pleasant day, in the 60s with sunshine, but it’s a substantial hike (two miles) from one end (the Lincoln Memorial) to the other (the Capitol).  We climbed the hill to the Washington Monument, reopened in May after being damaged in an August 2011 earthquake.  Like for the White House, we had decided on this trip too late to be able to get tickets to go inside and up to the top.  I hadn’t realized that the Washington Monument was on a hill, right in the middle of the National Mall.

We headed for the National Gallery of Art, which is in two buildings at the northeast corner of the Mall.  We cut through the sculpture garden and were tempted to have lunch at the pleasant Pavilion Café there.  Lonely Planet says that the best restaurants on the Mall are the three cafes at the National Gallery.  All three have small menus, but the one with the widest variety is the Cascade Café, a large cafeteria in the underground concourse between the West and East Buildings, next to a skylit waterfall.  We decided to eat there, though we were also tempted by the Garden Café, which looked nice, in the West Building between the entrance and the gift shop.  Maybe, as things went, we would have been better off at either the Pavilion or the Garden.   Both of us, after looking around at the rather unappealing possibilities, ended up with curried chicken.  I also had the brussels sprouts and rice pilaf sides, while Mary Joy had a salad from the salad bar.

We now had about an hour before we needed to leave, if we were to be at the Capitol Visitors Center by 2:15.  A major Degas-Cassatt exhibit had just finished the day before, but it turned out that the centerpiece of the gallery’s French Impressionism-Post-Impressionism permanent collection is Degas’s wax sculpture, the Little Fourteen-Year-Old Dancer, and they also have a major Cassatt, the wonderful Boating Party, as well as a whole roomful of Cezannes, and much more.  We only had time to see this part of the museum, then pop across the hall for my Turner fix: the best of their three Turners being the Keelmen Heaving in Coals by Moonlight, from 1835.  It would be nice to get a chance to visit the National Gallery again, when we have more time to spend there, though Mary Joy now has a bias against the place, for reasons that will be discussed below.

We walked up Capitol Hill and around to the rear, where the new Visitors Center is belowground, between the Capitol”s South Wing and the Library of Congress.  Security was just a matter of a guard looking through our daypacks.  No liquids at all are allowed.  The suggestion that we arrive 45 minutes before the time of our tour turned out to be unnecessary in this case.  We got right through security with no delay and were able to get tickets for the 2:20 tour, forty minutes before our reservation.

The tour starts with a 13-minute large-screen film called “Out of Many, One.”  Lonely Planet calls the film “cheesy,” but says that the tour greatly improves afterwards.  Our experience was pretty much the opposite.  The film was pleasant; the tour itself was dull.  You filed into one of several lines and were given a headset.  The docent leading the group in your line (in our case, a dark-haired young woman with glasses) talked to you through the headset, while the various groups were led up, down and around, trying to stay out of each other’s way.  There are a lot of statues, some paintings, some old furniture (in the old Supreme Chambers—vacated many years ago), and a demonstration of an acoustical trick—our docent took off her microphone and had us take off our headphones and stand around the floor marker that showed where John Quincy Adams had sat when he was in the House of Representatives after his term as President.  Then she went across to another point in the room (the old House chamber, now a statuary hall) bent over toward the floor and spoke in a normal speaking voice, and we heard her as if she had been right next to us.  The Capitol dome is in process of repair, so only part of the painting in the cupola, The Apotheosis of Washington, was visible.  I’ll have to say that I didn’t feel that I was missing much.  The whole tour, film included, lasted about an hour.  Some people complained that our docent was rude.  I wouldn’t say that, but she was set on moving things along.  The tour doesn’t take you to the current Senate and House Chambers—you need a gallery pass to enter those, apparently easy enough to get from the office of your Senator or Representative, or, if you are not American, from a desk in the Capitol.  Neither house was currently in session.  I wasn’t interested in seeing either room (you can see them on CSPAN, which televises congressional floor proceedings), so we followed the tunnel to the Library of Congress., arriving just in time for the tour of that building.

We liked that tour much better than the other.  Part of that was the personality of our docent, a wise-cracking octogenarian lawyer named Chuck.  Part of it was that the building itself is more ornate and less self-important.  After the tour, we went through an exhibition on the Civil Rights Act of 1964, then one on Thomas Jefferson’s personal library (which formed the basis of the current Library), then went downstairs to an exhibition on George and Ira Gershwin, including George’s piano.

By then, Mary Joy was not feeling well.  We went outside and sat on a bench for a while, then went two blocks south, to the Capitol South Metro station, and caught a train to the Metro Center station, where we transferred to the Red Line, going to Dupont Circle and from there walking to our hotel.

Mary Joy had intestinal tract problems.  Food poisoning?  We had both eaten the same thing at the Cascade Café, except that she had had a salad.  Or had she picked up some bacterium elsewhere?  In any case, she was in no condition to go to dinner at the restaurant we had picked out from Lonely Planet, the Tabard Inn.  She insisted that I go and give her a report, afterwards picking up some soup and a roll for her from Whole Foods.

I went to the Tabard Inn, a few blocks away.  It is a small boutique hotel.  You enter through a small lobby and follow the restaurant signs through a lounge of the sort that you’d find in a B & B.  A small (two-man?) light jazz ensemble was playing there.  The restaurant is small, entered through the bar.  I had brought along the free Washington Post provided by Hotel Rouge, to read during dinner, though it was a little difficult due to the low level of lighting (Ironically, it would have been even more difficult to read during dinner at Afterwords, the restaurant at Kramerbooks, since the lighting there was substantially worse).  I had a branzino, a European sea bass, which I liked, even though, as the waiter had forewarned me, it had head, tail and bones.  I’ll have to admit that I am not the foodie that Mary Joy is.  Like at most restaurants in Washington, the meal was pricier than it would have in the Twin Cities.

I went to Whole Foods, got the soup and roll, as well as some things for breakfast the next morning, and returned to the hotel.  Mary Joy was feeling enough better to enjoy her soup and roll.  Her ailment was not like the 24-hour virus that she had caught in Salzburg in 2000, passing it to me as we went on to Bamberg.  That had been nasty.

So we went to bed.

Mount Vernon and the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception

On Sunday, October 5, 2014, we got up at 6:10 a.m. and were out the door around an hour later.  We mentioned to the people at the hotel desk that we’d be out all day and, without prompting, they gave us vouchers for free glasses of wine, since we wouldn’t be there for the wine hour in the lobby from 5 p.m. to 6 p.m.  We were really pleased with the service at Hotel Rouge.

We walked down to the Farragut North Metro station, on the way passing the Mayflower Hotel, where Mary Joy and her high school classmates had stayed in 1971 (?).  It and the neighborhood were much nicer-looking than she remembered them to have been 43 years ago.  We used our Smartrip cards to take the Red Line for three stops, then exited at Gallery Place-Chinatown and went downstairs to the Green Line.  We took that to Waterfront and walked three blocks, through a recently-developed and newly-developing area, by the Arena Stage theater, down to the Spirit Cruises dock, where we picked up our tickets and, at 8:15, went aboard the Spirit of Mount Vernon.

We got seats at a table on the upper, open deck.  It was cold—temperature in the low forties—and we had several layers of sweaters on.  A little after 8:30, the ship’s horn blew several blasts and we headed down the Washington Channel toward the Potomac River.  Around 10:00, after a pleasant, though cold, cruise with live narration as to what we were passing, we arrived at the wharf for Mount Vernon.

As we left the boat we were handed tickets with the time 10:35.  That was when we could start standing in line to enter the house.  We walked up the hill through the woods, past George Washington’s tomb, where several elderly military veterans were addressing a small crowd, telling when and where they had served.  A man dressed in an 18^th-century soldier’s uniform started playing a fife as we continued up the hill, past a cornfield and some fenced-in cattle of what looked like an antiquated breed—first the Army Hymn (“As the Caissons Go Rolling Along”), then the Navy Hymn (“Anchors Away”), then the Marine Hymn (“From the Halls of Montezuma”), then finally the Air Force Hymn (“Off We Go Into the Wild Blue Yonder”).  Then we were across the Bowling Green, Mount Vernon’s west lawn, from Washington’s house.  He had inherited the original house and a great deal of land from his older half-brother, Lawrence Washington, in the 1750s.  We were five minutes early to get in line, so we took a quick look at the Upper Garden, with its tubbed exotics (kept in a heated greenhouse during the winter), then were ready to wend our way, past the “necessary” (outhouse) designed by Washington himself, up to the house.

Mount Vernon, we learned, was and is sided not in stone, but “rusticated” wood—made to look like stone, by means of grooves and a coating of sand.  Starting in 1759, Washington expanded his brother’s small house so that while it is still not large by modern standards, and certainly no palace, it was the comfortable abode of a wealthy gentleman farmer, who, at his death in 1799, operated several farms, a grist mill and a profitable distillery, with the labor of over 300 slaves.

As the line snaked its way through the house, each room had its own docent, who kept repeating the same information as new people arrived.  You’d think that that would get tiresome to them very quickly.  I assume that they must have switched rooms pretty often.

We wandered around the grounds and various outbuildings, and didn’t have time to see the museum or the orientation films before we had lunch (good) at the Mount Vernon Inn, with its pseudo-colonial atmosphere.  Then we went through the gift shop (my credit card did not escape unscathed) and had to hurry back to Spirit of Mount Vernon before it started its return trip at 1:30.
down to the landing to board the

There was no narration on the way back, but the temperature had now reached a one-sweater level, so it was pleasant to sit in the sun up on the top deck.  On arrival, we asked one of the employees about a seafood restaurant recommended by one of our relatives, but, alas, it had succumbed to the wholesale redevelopment of the waterfront.

We went back to the Metro station, caught the Green Line back to Gallery Place-Chinatown, but caught the Red Line going east, not west.  We almost got on a wrong train, since the map in the station showed one stop as “New York Avenue” instead of the “NoMa-Gallaudet” that showed on the internet and paper maps and on the trains themselves. 

As we approached the CUA (Catholic University of America) station, we could see, towering above everything, the largest Catholic church in North America, the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception.  Our
Cathedral of Saint Paul is big, holding around 3000 worshipers, but the National Shrine can contain 7000.

We got off the train and crossed the CUA campus to this impressive church.  I’ll have to admit that I was not expecting to like it.  Last year at this time, we went to La Crosse, Wisconsin, where we visited the Shrine of Our Lady of Guadalupe, which is an intentionally retro statement, a 1950s church built in the twenty-first century, proclaiming the superiority of the pre-Vatican II Church.  The difference was that the Immaculate Conception Shrine was innocently retro, a 1950s church built in the 1950s (and earlier), with some interesting modernistic art and stained glass.

High above the apse was a huge modern version of the Pantocrator, Christ as ruler in judgment of the world.  This is not the warm, fuzzy Jesus.  He is clearly ticked off.  Blond and built like a football player (he must have been working in the weight room), he spreads his arms with the wounded hands held up against us, his brows arched in anger, as if to say, "Stop right there, miscreant!  Come no closer!  You're in real trouble!"

But it's a beautiful church.  The many side altars are all dedicated to Mary under her various aspects, as venerated by the various nations of the world.  We wandered around until the 4:30 mass was ready to begin.

Again, we were impressed.  The liturgy and music, even with only an organist and cantor, were wonderful. 

After mass, we took the Red Line back to Dupont Circle, where we browsed some at Kramerbooks and then had dinner at the attached restaurant, Afterwords, which was strongly recommended in Lonely Planet.  Again, Lonely Planet hit the mark.  I had the chicken pot pie, which was by far the best I’ve ever had—how was it possible to cook the vegetables perfectly, not crunchy and not mushy, but to the exact right consistency?  Mary Joy had a wonderful crab cake pasta.
Then we walked back to the hotel and used our wine vouchers for glasses of chardonnay in the bar.  And so, to bed.

Washington, D.C.

Saturday, October 4, 2014.  As usual, we parked our car at an off-airport site, getting in early
enough and going through security quickly enough that we were able to eat a sit-down breakfast at French Meadow--scrambled egg in a croissant, with hash browns and guacamole.  It didn't seem quite up to the standards of the main restaurant in Minneapolis.

When we got to our gate, the flight was already boarding, forty minutes before scheduled takeoff.  The plane ended up leaving the gate at 8:35 a.m., fifteen minutes ahead of schedule.  This year Frontier Airlines has made some changes, going down the road toward real budget-airline status--charging for everything, including carry-on bags and water.  Also, they now (since I don't know when) fly directly from MSP to Washington Dulles, and very cheaply, even adding in the baggage fees.  So, when we were looking for somewhere to go on our October getaway, our nation's capital beckoned.  I've never been there.  Mary Joy was there once many years ago.

We got into Dulles about half an hour early (11:50 instead of 12:20) and were picked up by a relative who lives nearby.  We visited with him and his family until a little after 5 p.m., when he dropped us off at the new Wiehle-Reston East Metrorail station.  There we went to a machine,  and using my Visa card bought two Smartrip cards for ten dollars apiece ($2 for the card and $8 worth of ride credit) and added ten more dollars of credit to each card.  I had learned how to do this on some YouTube videos, though in the end I goofed up the timing and a Metro station employee helped me finish.

About ten minutes later we caught a Silver Line train.  After the train went underground, it became clear that the lights weren't working in the cars, so we were all riding in the dark.  At the next station we stopped for several minutes.  The driver explained that they were trying to reset the circuit breaker.  Then there was light.  We changed to the Red Line at Metro Center, took it two stops to Dupont Circle, and went up a long escalator, emerging into the twilight. 

From there it was a little over ten minutes walk to our hotel, the Hotel Rouge.  We liked this hotel very much, although some TripAdvisor reviewers complained about its over-the-top décor (very wild and red, with eight identical statues of Aphrodite out front and zebra-pattern corridor carpets).  Our room (801) was large, comfortable and quiet.  The location, eight blocks due north of the White House on 16th Street, in the Embassy Row area, is nice and convenient, though not right on top of a metro station.

After checking in, having been well fed by our relatives, we decided to get something light and
inexpensive at the nearby P Street Whole Foods--the largest we've seen, with a well-stocked Hot Bar and Salad Bar.  We selected our food and ate it at the mezzanine seating area, then got more supplies for breakfast and snacks and a bottle of distilled water for my CPAP anti-apnea machine.  Then we went back to the hotel.

Next?

Family health issues have required us to stick close to home.  We may go to Europe in June, depending on how things play out.  We have changed our India trip from last fall to next fall.