Back from Washington and Williamsburg

Sorry I dropped off the blogging scene. My fiance went on a business trip to Washington DC, and I tagged along all week. So while he was "working" I got to see many great national museums. We also took a weekend detour to Colonial Williamsburg, which as a kid I wanted to go to more than Disneyland (yeah, I was pretty strange child). Of course, this week I've been in History Buff Heaven. I'll write about the details later.

But yeesh, the return trip was a real pain. We could have gone straight from Williamsburg, VA to Boston using Amtrak (10 hours of boredom), but my fiance's plane ticket was paid for, so we switched transportation modes. So we took Amtrak, Metro subway, airplane (with a lot of wait time and delays), and then the Boston bus shuttle and subway to get home. The trip took us 12 hours! I was especially shocked to find that stretches of Amtrak Virginia only had one railroad track. So we had to wait for CSX to go by first...which made it almost four hours just to travel 114 miles! Boston's Logan airport was also congested, so we had to sit on the DC runway for an hour waiting for the go ahead from Boston to takeoff. O_o

At Union Station in Washington DC, I saw an exciting concept display about the new high speed rail train that would go through the Northeast corridor. Within 25 years, they are hoping to build rails that could support trains that can go as high as 220 miles an hour. Wow. Boston to Washington DC in 3 hours instead of 10 boring hours on the train or having an hyperventilating episode on a fuel-heavy plane. Trains also produces 5 times less carbon emissions then a car or plane. Wow. Maybe we can catch up to Japan and Europe.

I admit, I never wanted to buy a car (have you been in Boston or New York during rush hour?!), but this funny 18th-century inspired commercial almost made me reconsider...