Obamaland, Part 1

I recently embarked on a trip to D.C. with my church choir, to sing at the National Cathedral.  It went pretty well, overall, despite coming right on the heels of a particularly gruelling Holy Week sing-o-rama.  We were a little bit smaller of a group this time around; I guess after 2 weeks in England, a weekend in Washington, D.C. didn't sound quite as thrilling!  

We were short 3 kids in particular because of some crazy parents (go fig).  There was one 8-year-old who had been singing with us off and on throughout the year...well, perhaps singing isn't the right word.  He had been standing with the choir, usually backwards mid-anthemn, and swinging his arms, not singing, not even holding his music, and generally just being a distraction...the kind of stuff you might expect from one who is clearly too young to be there.  So our choirmast finally asked his parents to keep him home until he's old enough to behave.  Well, you'd think he'd beaten the boy and strung him up from the steeple with the ridiculous response from the kid's parents.  They sent this *crazy* email to the entire choir, apparently in an attempt to garner support, but they only ended up exposing their insanity to the whole congregation.  They said all kinds of stupid things, among them my favorite thing of all time - accusing us all of being "unchristian" as a means of getting their way.  I just LOVE it when people pull that one out of their hats and think they are righteous in doing so.  I would love to be that high and mighty, it must feel quite nice up on your lonely cross in Crazytown.  At any rate, the end result being that the parents are now refusing to let their other two kids, both of whom are pretty strong choristers, from participating unless all three of them can.  Because, you know, all kids are exactly the same and should be treated as such no matter the age difference.  *sigh*  It is times like these I realize how great my parents really were.  If I pulled that kind of crap, they would have blamed me, not the adults.  My sincerest apologies to all of you out there who are teachers or otherwise work with small kids and their parents.  I would say you should be sainted, but that's probably unchristian of me...

At any rate, it was 4.5 hours on a bus again to D.C. with a group of small children - not too bad, as we kept them entertained with Wall-E (which I hadn't seen, and very much enjoyed) and Chitty Chitty Bang Bang (which I slept through).  We stayed at the National 4-H Youth Conference Center in Chevy Chase, Maryland - a little scary, as our last experience with such a place was the Baden Powell House in London, complete with its 2-inch thick mattresses and airplane-sized bathrooms.  This place was rather nice, though, quite like an ordinary hotel.  We went straight to the cathedral and did our Evensong, and had a tour of the crypts to visit the mausoleums of Helen Keller and Anne Sullivan, among others.  

After dinner at an enormous (seriously, there were like a dozen dining rooms in that place) Mexican restaurant, it was back to the 4-H center in beautiful Chevy Chase, which is completely suburban and nowhere near anything remotely interesting or a Metro station to get to something that is.  Luckily the evening was saved by a hastily purchased bottle of bourbon from the liquor store near the cathedral (booze and Jesus - it's a winning combo), and we had a little hotel party with some of the adults ala our time spent at Sarum College in lovely Salisbury.  Although, whereas The Close in England had old world charm and medieval architecture to enjoy, Chevy Chase has...well, at least we had that bottle of bourbon.

The next day we did the whole National Mall thing.  The kids were scheduled for a visit to the Air and Space Museum, which I've seen and honestly was seeking a quieter afternoon away from our kids and 8,000 others, so I ventured off on my own.  I ended up spending most of the afternoon at the National Gallery with some European Masters (funny that most of the art at the U.S. National Gallery is from Europe) and wandered through the sculpture gardens and around the area a bit.  Then we were off to the National Zoo, which was oddly enough, back in Chevy Chase, MD.  That was fun, as I hadn't been to a zoo in awhile (Nate doesn't like them), and I managed to find myself in the company of adults away from the kids once again, except that we had like 3 hours to kill there, which is just too much zoo for one day.  It didn't take long before the two other gay gents in my group started watching for animals of another sort basking in the sun of the first warm day of spring, which was probably more entertaining than the ones behind bars.  

Having fulfilled our 3 hour safari, we we off to Baltimore, where we would sing the Sunday services the next day at a lovely old church downtown.  Not much to see in Baltimore - a somewhat depressing trip to an Indian restaurant where I got trapped sitting at the "old people" end of the table had me calling for an early night.  We did have an amazing hotel room there, though, in a suite on the 34th floor.  The only weird thing was there was only one bed instead of a double, so the guy I was rooming with offered to sleep on the couch, which was fine with me as he snored like a rusty chainsaw, and I felt that made up for the resulting lack of sleep the previous evening.  Sunday morning went great - better than at the Cathedral, actually, the acoustic was very live and warm, whereas the sound tended to get lost in the enormous space of the cathedral.  Afterwards, we were back on the bus for the journey home - unfortunately for us, so were like 2 million other people and we did a lot of sitting in traffic.  It being the Sunday after Easter, most likely a lot of families were on vacation that week, and everyone was on the NJ Turnpike, joy.  We ended up having to go a different route which meant the NYCers couldn't get dropped off in the city and had to go all the way to Rye, then take the train back to the City.  Kind of a bummer, but I'd take the Metro-North over a bus any day.  Not necessarily quite the exciting trip that England was, but it was an experience, I will say that!  It was so much fun that our choirmaster promised that we're not going to do any more overnight trips for at least 2 years (none of us objected).  

It was so much fun, in fact, that I'm going back to D.C. next week.  A friend of ours is getting married, so Nate and I are going down a few days early for a little getaway after 4 months of him being in perma-rehearsal.  We unfortunately waited a little long to book a hotel, and as luck would have it, it happens to be the same weekend as Georgetown's commencement, so hotels were booked and pricey.  I spent a full day searching for something we could afford that was remotely near a Metro station, and ultimately came up with 1 option at the end of one of the train lines that was still more than we wanted to spend (where was it?  You guessed it - Chevy Chase, MD).  I was about to book it when Nate had the idea to check for bed and breakfasts.  I was skeptical that we'd find anything, but the first thing that popped up actually turned out to be a cute little condo rental right in the heart of D.C. for the same price we would have paid to stay in a crappy 1-star hotel.  It's walking distance from a Whole Foods, supposedly in the heart of a hip area, and did I mention that it looks really cute in the pictures?  Keep your fingers crossed that it doesn't turn out to be a crackhouse or a vacant lot or something...  If you don't hear from me again, you'll have your answer, stay tuned!

Trip to D.C. with the Christ's Church Choir