Virginia - Day 1 - getting here

Fredericksburg VA/Washington D.C. South KOA
Friday, 1 March 2019

my 12th state

I turned the wrong way out of Arlington National Cemetery and couldn't figure out how to turn around, so today I spent taking the scenic route.

route

today's

Before I left the campground this morning I spent a lot of time carefully studying online maps to figure out exactly what the various intersections would look like - the route had me driving down Independence Ave. past various monuments and around the Lincoln Memorial where about 5 different streets come together, and I wanted to try to minimize the number of wrong turns I'd make.  And it worked out perfectly.  No wrong turns.  No problem at all.

These statues flank the entrance to the Memorial Bridge across the Potomac from the Lincoln Memorial to the Arlington National Cemetery.  There was construction on the bridge, narrowing it to 2 lanes in which space they squeezed 3 lanes - mine going out of town and 2 coming in.  I solved that by doing some lane straddling to keep my right mirror from hitting the street light poles, and the oncoming drivers saw me coming and moved over without even arguing.  Very nice, I thought.

The parking area at the cemetery charges $2/hour for cars and $8/hour for everything else, including RVs.  I overstayed my 1st hour by about 3 minutes, so I got to pay $16 for the privilege.  But I thought we deserved to stop and walk and eat lunch and rest after that first drive through city traffic.  I decided to come back to visit the cemetery another time, now that I've seen the set-up - and just consider the parking fee the price of admission.

And it never occurred to me I should spend some time studying maps for the rest of the drive like I had for the first part, but I should have.  Oh well.  I ended up on the George Washington Parkway driving up the Potomac, and the only places I could get off weren't any places I'd ever heard of and I was afraid of getting even more lost.  But I was headed north at 50 mph and all I knew was that I'd been intending to go south.

I ended up stopping 3 times this afternoon to check maps, both paper and online, to try to figure out where I was and how to get where I was aiming.  But at least this way I passed through Vienna (which I hadn't heard of), and the entrance to the George Bush Center for Intelligence (aka CIA) in Langley (part of McLean) and the Sikh Foundation of Virginia, with a large gold dome that I can't find an online photo of, sadly.

When I finally got to I-95 I ran into a traffic slowdown that lasted for miles and miles, and I never did figure out why.  No towns nearby.  No accidents.  A few miles along, there was a pickup with a trailer on the side of the road with its hazard lights flashing, but it didn't look like there was a problem or had been a problem.  And anyway, the slowdown kept being slow after that.  Weird.  But I told myself it's a Friday afternoon heading out of town so they probably didn't need another reason.

When I called to make a reservation at this campground, they noticed I'd been here before which I hadn't remembered.  I went back to my posts in the middle of March a year ago and, sure enough, I was here for 2 nights.  My posts then mentioned a really steep hill leading here, and that it's in a valley so no TV signal.  I'd been intending to stay here 5 or 6 nights and use it as a base to explore this area, but that information changed my mind.  The weather's being so changeable lately that I don't really want to do without the morning TV weather reports.  And I don't really want to cope with a hill coming and going to sightseeing spots.  So my reservation's just for 2 nights.  Sunday I'm moving back up the road to a campground near Quantico.

Before I drove here, I thought maybe I'd exaggerated how steep the hill was because it was my first in the RV.  But it really is steep and I can see why it unnerved me a year ago.  But now, after Pennsylvania's mountains, I don't really find it intimidating any more.  Just steep.  I guess I've learned something from this trip.