Day: June 27, 2009

26 June. Five Pictures from my Washington DC trip.

The plus of digital cameras is that you can take as many pictures as you would like. The minus is that you come home from a vacation with 700+ pictures that you then have to decide what to do with. In these blog posts of my trip to Washington DC, I am hearkening back to an era when six rolls of film seemed a bit excessive for a seven day trip. I am limiting my pictures to five per day. So we begin.

The first day of the trip. The day of travel. Not much to look at here, in fact, the act of getting to my destination was so boring I only have four pictures.

I spent a lot of time in the Detroit airport. My layover was so long that my flight wasn’t even posted on the board when I wandered up to my gate. So I walked the entire length of the terminal. Ostensibly, I was looking for the best place to buy food, seeing as how the airlines can’t be bothered to feed you anymore, but really I was killing time. The time-killing allowed time for pictures, so all of today’s selections are of the Detroit airport.

One of my favorite games to play in airports, is “beat the person walking on the people movers.” Basically you go somewhere with a people mover, you let an unsuspecting person in front of you get onto the people mover and then you walk alongside the people mover, attempting to reach the end of your non-moving sidewalk before the other person reaches the end of their moving sidewalk. Let me tell you, it isn’t very hard to beat people. People spending time in airports are generally very. slow. walkers. Because I had ample time to play this game, I let some of them get a very big start. But I almost always beat them. People who don’t walk, but stand on people movers? I could probably do cartwheels down the terminal and still beat them.

The Detroit airport isn’t super memorable, but this fountain was nice. Also note that if you don’t want to walk the whole length of the terminal, you can take the shiny red train from one end to another. As someone whose gate is always at the exact end of the terminal from which I am currently standing, I can say this train is a very good idea.
A fun surprise as I sat next to the fountain were these rocks. They were in a planter, and I first thought they were intentionally written on, but I realized later that the whole thing most likely happened organically. Someone with a Sharpie wrote something on a rock and someone else followed suit. Most of the things seemed to be of the advice type and it was fun to see the different languages represented.

If you are a pressed penny collector, the Detroit airport is for you! Washington DC? Not so much, as it turns out. Detroit had three different pressed penny machines–the good kind, where you get to turn the crank yourself. I didn’t have enough change to get one at every machine, but I’m happy with my “Model T” and “Motor City” designs.

Thus concludes the first day of vacation.

26 June 2008 A picture from the Hungary/Romania trip.

I never got the blog posts done last year for the trip to Hungary and Romania I took with the YRUU youth last year. So this year, I am posting one picture from each day of the trip. It isn’t the full travelogue, but it is better than nothing. Pictures might be a spectacular photo, or a not-so-spectacular one that encapsulates one aspect of the trip for me.

Today’s selection:

We flew out on June 26 and arrived in Budapest sometime on June 27? I don’t know, the length of travel time, plus the time zone change has me confused. So this picture isn’t really from June 26, but it was kind of like June 26 because we had magically crossed many time zones over many hours. At any rate, upon arrival, we were tired. We were so tired that Eric and Christine fell asleep on the bus from the airport to the church. I was so tired that when I met my host family, and they asked me what I wanted to do, my answer was, “Eat and then sleep.” Because they were such a gracious host family, we did exactly that.