Day 1 – Washington DC

Dulles International Airport is approx 30 miles out of Washington and it took quite some time getting to the hotel once we had landed. After queueing for what seemed like an age at customs it was about an hour to the hotel. For most of the journey to the city we were actually in Virginia.

Really nice hotel -The Madison – and the staff are really helpful and friendly. There’s the two guys on the reception: Innocent and Lewis and the Concierge is called Tony. Innocent wanted to talk about the Queen and was convinced we must know her personally, living in the same town and all!! Don’t think he was convinced England is big enough for more than one town! He seemed surprised that we had left the country while the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee was on. Made us laugh.

Our hotel room is really nice and we found we had got our apetite back after the road-kill incident at 4am this morning. Yep, the rabbit is forgotten and we headed out to find a famous little restaurant call Ben’s Chili Bowl, visited previously by President Obama, former french president Nicolas Sarcozy, Hilary Clinton and many other celebs over the years. The place is adorned with wall to wall photos of their visits. So the guy who served us our chili took one of us, which won’t find its way onto their wall.

Here’s the link and it’s worth a visit if you are ever in town!
http://www.benschilibowl.com/ordereze/Default.aspx

The 20 min walk to the Chili Bowl was along leafy streets with wonderful, quaint and sometimes odd houses, side by side with ornate churches of all denominations. We found the people to be very friendly and ready to say hello.

Now we are back at the hotel. It’s 20:45 – that’s a quarter to two in the morning in England. Rachel has already crashed out, leaving me to write up this brief account of the first day of our road trip.

Tomorrow is going to be very busy.

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