Portugal Trip Day 2: DC

We were supposed to wake up in Lisbon.

Instead, we woke up near Dulles Airport with no luggage, no clean clothes, and a new mission: squeeze as much DC as possible out of one accidental layover day without missing our second chance at Portugal.

The plan was simple. Get clean clothes. Find food. Hit the National Mall. See as much of DC as we could in the few hours we had. Then, most importantly, get to our flight on time.

We were about ten minutes from the closest Target, forty minutes from DC, and ten minutes from the airport. Our flight wasn’t until 10:30 p.m., so technically, we had time.

Then we woke up late.

It had taken us a while to get settled the night before. We had to call our first hotel in Lisbon and let them know that, despite the fact that our flight had arrived on time, we had not arrived with it. Instead, we would be showing up the next day.

By 9 a.m., we realized we'd probably be skipping breakfast in favor of making a quick Target run and maybe grab some snacks there.

Target was supposed to be a quick tactical strike.

It was not.

Clean clothes were expensive. Good jeans were difficult to find. Snack logistics became weirdly complicated. We didn’t want to buy a whole box of something just to carry it around DC all day, but we also didn’t want to spend the day hungry and underprepared. Somehow, our simple “grab a few things” errand ate half the morning. (Aaron exaggerates, we were in target for an hour, 1 and 18 minutes tops.)

By noon, we were finally heading back to the hotel.

Our driver was friendly and curious, so we told him our whole sob story: missed connection, no luggage, emergency Target run, and our hopeful plan to squeeze in a few hours of DC before heading back to Dulles.

He did not seem as optimistic about this plan as we were.

With the calm concern of someone who has seen DC traffic ruin lives before, he warned us that getting out of the city after 4 p.m. could be a disaster. Rush hour, he explained, was destined to be the villain of the day.

He suggested we leave DC by 3:30 if we wanted to be safely back near the airport by 7:30.

Fine.

That still gave us enough time to hit the National Mall and maybe grab a small lunch. We rushed to change into our new fits and back down to call yet another Uber.

By 12:45, we were looking at Lincoln.

Achievement unlocked.

We did a lap. Washington Monument. Boom.

Democracy checkpoint complete.

Then we started getting hungry, so we found a Potbelly sandwich shop nearby. Lunch in DC. Check. Not exactly a historic landmark, but calories are calories.

At this point, we started to relax a little.

There’s a lot in DC. Maybe more than we could sprint to see. Kaylea googled what was nearby, which is always dangerous when you are married to someone who believes “just a few blocks away” is a reasonable travel category.

That’s when we found it.

The Declaration of Independence was at the National Archives, just a few blocks away.

Nicholas Cage jokes ensued.

We spent about an hour speedrunning the museum. The Bill of Rights. The Louisiana Purchase. The Magna Carta. Not a bad little document room.

But it was getting late.

By 3 p.m., we decided it was probably time to get an Uber back to our hotel.

But wait!

The National Gallery of Art was just across the street.

We could maybe spare another thirty minutes.

The detour was totally worth it.

It was immediately obvious that thirty minutes was ridiculous. Monet. Van Gogh. The Thinker. The kind of place where you walk in thinking, “We’ll just peek,” and then suddenly understand how people lose entire afternoons in museums.

We could have spent the whole day in there.

But then it was 4 p.m.

Kaylea was seeing art. Aaron was seeing missed connections.

Our driver’s warning was clear, and it is a little scary not being in the same state your flight is taking off from. Rush hour was closing in.

Aaron dragged Kaylea out and down the front of the National Gallery of Art and quickly called the last Uber of the day.

Boy this guy was fast. We're talking quick lane changes, break checks to keep us energized, and the grand finale of running a red light while simultaneously pulling a U-turn. Very Gone in Sixty Seconds.

He dropped us back at our hotel at 4:30., but we didn’t need to be at the airport for another three hours.

Was this overly cautious? Probably.

Did Aaron care? A little bit.

We had clean clothes, a half-day tour of DC, and enough time to write it all down.

Tomorrow, assuming the travel gods are finished testing us, we wake up in Lisbon.