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.