Sunday

Woke up feeling refreshed and excited about heading to Washington DC, had a little trek to find some breakfast but the place we’d seen last night wasn’t open so we ended up popping to Subway, Natalie asked for gherkins on her Philly Cheese Steak sub which the woman didn’t understand and we found this quite amusing, but let her know we meant pickles. Finally managed to get a cup of tea from the Starbucks in our hotel lobby, the women who served us liked the fact that we said “cheers” and it made me feel ever so British, they were the nicest people we’ve met so far (other than Kristen), everyone else has been a little bit strange and don’t seem to like talking too much!

We got a (much less scary and smelly) taxi to 30^th Street Station to board our train to DC, where a super cool attendant with a wireless microphone made the station announcements whilst walking around and opening the roped off platform gates. The journey on one of those iconic aluminium trains was pretty good; the seats were huge, they reclined and we had wifi. We were happy. We saw some nice scenery, travelled through Delaware and Baltimore, Maryland before hitting Washington DC.

We decided to get a taxi straight to our Airbnb apartment, Molly had already emailed us to tell us where the key was hidden and despite a massive queue at the taxi rank it wasn’t long before we made it to our new home. After fiddling around with the locks for ages, we got into the basement apartment and were very happy with our choice. Molly had left an array of snacks for us to nibble on, there was a kettle and the place looked just as good as in the photos.

We had a quick cup of tea, then got the metro (which is just across the road) into DC for a wander around and a spot of dinner.

We had planned to find a nice restaurant or bar to eat in, but we seemed to wander into an area with no food places at all. We finally decided just to get a sandwich from a place called Potbelly where we met the nicest sandwich maker that exists (possibly). Natalie had to say ‘meatball’ about five times and eventually the sandwich maker cracked up and told us that our accents were strange but that she loved them, then they laughed at us a little bit longer, we decided to play the ‘how British can we sound’ game by saying ‘cheers’ and ‘cheerio’, this is a fun game.

After our yummy sandwich we had an hour to kill before the Segway tour so we continued walking around and within about five minutes found Chinatown where there were loads of restaurants and pubs that we could have eaten in. Typical. We will go back there tomorrow.

The Segway tour that we were booked on started at 6pm, we met our tour guide Rory, a 24-year-old girl, who was awesome. We had our orientation and met the other six people who made up our Segway group. Everyone was very nice, we were the only Brits, a couple of the older ladies found it pretty difficult to get the hang of weight distribution and Cathy, one lady had a bit of an issue within the first two minutes where her Segway seemed to zoom out of control and sped past us all, in the middle of the road, franticly shouting “how do I stop, it won’t stop!” Rory managed to grab her before the crossing and got her under control, for a few minutes at least. It wasn’t long before Cathy was in the emergency stop squat position, not that it actually helped her stop. Poor Cathy.

Rory was the best tour guide we could have asked for, she had brilliant stories about all of the attractions, was full of useful information and was really chatty and gave us some pointers on where to go for good food. We were sad to leave her by the end, she was lovely and a good laugh, it would’ve been nice to go out drinking with her. 

With our feet feeling sore, and my eyelids feeling heavy, we made our way back home on the metro, an old black guy with a strong accent kept looking at me funny, it turned out to be because he thought I looked like someone off Saturday Night Live, I had no idea who he was on about but he was pretty nice so it was fine.

We didn’t get chance to meet Molly or Greg tonight, it was fairly late when we got in, plus it had just started to rain and access to our apartment means going outside, I wouldn’t bother coming down if I were them. I’m sure we’ll see them tomorrow after we’ve had another lovely day of sightseeing.