Does anyone remember Gary Hart? We ended up in the same marina (and reportedly in the same boat slip) that did him in. Well, it probably had more to do with what's-her-name sitting in his lap in the photo. Funny, I have never seen another boat bearing that particular moniker after that infamous shot. We arrived in DC after three days of sailing the Potomac. Yes it took three days, but a great visit to Occoquan encouraged us to take our time. Eventually we found ourselves staring at the 14th street bridge with a clear view of the Washington Monument to port, and the Capitol Building to starboard. I thought maybe we had sailed into the reflecting pond. A word of thanks to the engineers who built the new Woodrow Wilson Bridge with a 75 foot clearance for marine traffic. I cannot imagine calling the Wilson Bridge tender on the VHF radio and asking for a bridge opening at 4:00, probably tying up traffic from DC to Fredericksburg. Oh I used to cast spells of hatred on boats as I idled in my car for hours at the old Wilson Bridge when I lived (survived) in northern VA. Things look a lot better from the water.
Appropriately, the most interesting place we visited in DC was the Newseum - a six story building full of exhibits that made news. We spent three hours on the first floor, but made a full day of it and got to all six. A section of the Berlin Wall and one of the guard towers, the shack that the unabomber lived in, the door that the Watergate burglars taped open, John Dillinger's machine gun, and newspaper pages dating back to the invention of the printing press - I had a hard time not reading every word of every exhibit. After spending the next full day at the Library of Congress (another wow), we moved Senara to a marina in Alexandria and walked the old town. Thankfully we caught a fair current in the morning, set sail back down the big river, spent a couple of really hot nights on the hook, plugged in for some A/C in Yorktown and pulled into our home slip on my 50th birthday. Monkey business indeed.
Mount Vernon from the Potomac
Looking for the next Congressional scandal
Our view of the monument from the boat slip
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