I allowed myself the whole morning to take in the spectacular sights of Washington DC. Anything less would have been an injustice. And there is enough of that taking place in this town already right now. Nevertheless, it remains a stupendous piece of town planning and a capital worthy of the distinction. The national mall is huge. It is an elongated cross shape with the magnificently domed Capitol raised up at one end and the Parthenon-like Lincoln Memorial facing it at the opposite end, far, far away. In between, at the crossing point sits the tall white obelisk that is the Washington Monument, dwarfing the circle of American flags that ring its base. At the ends of the crossing pieces are the White House – which you can’t get near – and the Jefferson Memorial, which stands across the water of the tidal basin.
The scale of all this is epic. All down both sides of the grass covered mall between the Capitol and the crossing piece are a series of grand buildings housing a variety of world class museums, making up the Smithsonian Institution. There are Art Museums, a museum of space, the strikingly modern museum of African American History, and several others each in its own palatial building with gardens around them. My favourite was the national archive, whose garden contained a lake with fountains and sculptures, including a mick up of a Parisian metro station. And at various intervals in the spaces in between were a collection of elaborate memorials to wars fought by US military personnel (Korea, Vietnam, etc) whee all the soldiers names are carved in to the stone walls. Facing the Jefferson Memorial across the water is a larger than life statue of Rev Martin Luther King Jr, emerging from a huge block of roughly hewn stone, alongside a series of quotes from his speeches. It was as if so much American history had been gathered together to be commemorated in one single place.
As huge as they individually are, many of these monuments are still lost in the vastness of the whole space. A bicycle was therefore ideal for exploring all of this, which you can easily do without worrying about traffic. You do have to stay on the lookout for large school parties and oblivious tourists, but they are mostly benign. In the time I had available I was able to get around to everything I wanted to see and take many photos on this crisp, bright, clear sunny day. Walking it would have taken a very long time. The famous cherry blossom seemed to be over for the year, which was a slight disappointment to me, since it was a special memory from my very first visit here at Easter 1986, when I was in the early throes of a trans continental love affair, that later became a marriage of decades (and still counting). But that – like the scaffolding on the Lincoln Memorial – was a minor blemish on an otherwise fantastic morning. I felt privileged to be here in these exceptional surroundings.
But the trans continental adventure cyclist’s work is seldom done, so after lunch in the French metro station I returned to collect my bags, change my shoes and start the second part of my day, which involved cycling 50 miles to Baltimore. This began really well with a good 90 minutes of riding along dedicated cycle paths by a river on the “north east branch”. Despite adding a couple of extra miles through poor navigation, I finally broke into Maryland and followed a rather mixed route for the remaining thirty miles or so into downtown Baltimore. If I am honest I wasn’t terribly taken with this part of the day, finding a combination of dodgy road surfaces, narrow roads, busy traffic and scruffy neighbourhoods less to my liking. But my Airbnb was in a delightful and the historic part of central Baltimore, close to the new looking baseball stadium and walking distance to excellent food and drink options. I felt I had used this beautiful day well.
