well, the washington trip was a huge success, despite the fact that we were all really insanely tired most of the time. it seemed like we did so much walking… i'm not sure if the distances we covered were all that great, but we were on our feet and moving for what had to have been 15 or 16 hours a day.

yeah, so maybe that's an exaggeration.

anyway, we all had a great time, and we got to see a large portion of the things we'd set out to.

Day One: we get up bright and early, but not as bright or early as ben & mary, who got to the airport before six (i think) in order to check in two hours before our flight. any way you slice it, six something is way too early to be up and moving in the morning.

we did manage to get to the plane on time, and had no trouble on the flight over. we also managed to figure out how and where to catch the Amtrack that was going to take us from Baltimore to D.C.

then, trouble.

as it turns out, it's fairly easy to get distracted at 10 something in the morning, especially when you only got 3 hours sleep the night before and have a new toy in your hands. so easy, in fact, that one might be susceptible to such an unlikely thing as losing one's luggage.

once i explained the situation to the conductor (or whatever he was) he told me that it'd already been picked up and would be on its way with one of the next trains.

after waiting for a few "next trains", and with the help of several friendly Amtrack employees, we managed to track down the guy i'd spoken to, and through him, the woman who'd picked up my bag at the train station… of course, my bag had never made it onto that "next train."

more arrangements were made, and this time enough to my satisfaction that we felt comfortable leaving the glorious confines of Union Station. we proceeded on to the hotel but couldn't check in yet as we were still early, so we checked our baggage with the concierge, and started walking towards the Capitol and our scheduled appointment with a Congressman's intern.

our tour of the capitol was conducted by a two-week-old intern, who seemed to have a pretty good grasp of things anyway. after the tour, we got to go with another intern to a subcommittee hearing.

after the capitol, sara & I parted from ben & mary, and proceeded back to Union Station to retrieve my newly arrived bag. considering the events of the day, and our still fresh "vacation legs", about all we did after that was have a little dinner at the restaurant/bar off our hotel's lobby. There was some kind of company party going on, and at some point, and extremely inebriated woman comes over to ask us for a light, then proceeds to tell us all about how she likes to fuck young men, but not get involved with them. she also took it upon herself to recommend mary ditching ben and finding herself someone "better." … a here i thought we'd find no-one with any class in D.C.

alright, well, i was gonna throw this all into one big post, but it was becoming a really big post, so i'm gonna break it up. don't worry it was only a four day trip, and only three of those were really spent in D.C…. so there's only two more to go. whiny little bastards.

my major project the last several days has been getting my php based gallery scripts that i've been using on lucifigousprick.com and old-man.net adapted for ye olde bipolar. eventually i'll have these scripts worked to such a fine polish, that only minor modifications will be necessary for moving them to new digs… if i do it right, anyway.

well, without further ado, i give you the Washington D.C. photo gallery.