Coming Home

I’ve been on the road traveling pretty much constantly since mid-2014 and I am just now able to breathe. Hence, the hiatus in posting on this blog. One weekend recently, I was with my family at our weekend place; my brother-in-law traveled separately from the rest of us, taking the train. In the little town where we are, the train stops not too far from the house, and there is always a busy if small gathering of people waiting to meet the travelers who are arriving. The station is one of those where you can park right next to the tracks and the platform, so you can even sit in the car and see the train coming in and the passengers alight. Sometimes the train is late, as it was that evening, but there is always a tableau. Some families with balloons for college kids returning home. A few kids waiting for their dad or mom. And just people in transit, moving through the old-fashioned station with its covered portico and flickering lights.

A little Norman Rockwell, I’ll admit but there is indeed something moving about it. Many singers and musicians have written about trains and what they mean to us as a sense of place and travel in time – think of Merle Haggard and Train Whistle Blues (“Every time I see that lonesome railroad train, It makes we wish I was going home again”) or Peter, Paul and Mary and 500 Miles (“If you miss the train I’m on you will know that I am gone”). Or one of my favorites, from Marc Cohn, Ghost Train:

Some trains they leave in the morning

Some leave in the afternoon

Some trains they leave here

Right on time

And some they just leave too soon

A few years back, the UK Telegraph even had an article about great train-related songs – you can find it at http://www.telegraph.co.uk/travel/journeysbyrail/6406122/Music-on-the-train-Great-rail-related-songs.html 

In a world where plane travel is the fastest way to go, and where the automobile is still viewed as the easiest freedom on the road, there is something special about the train, even when it’s just passing through the station in your town, on the way to another place.

– Laura Flippin

Playing Tourist in My Hometown (Part 1)

I’m a native of the Washington DC area, and over the years have seen most of the famous landmarks and locations multiple times. But more often during the daily commute, I mostly see monuments and museums as they pass by in the rush-hour traffic. It’s been a long time since I spent a weekend or more touring in my own hometown. This past weekend, during the Independence Day holiday, with some friends and family in town, however, I did the marathon of tourism. With two thirteen-year old boys in tow, neither of whom had been to DC before except briefly when they were too small to remember the trip, we had a lot of ground to cover. We began on Friday with lunch at Matchbox in Chinatown – great food but service was slow , followed by the Newseum on Pennsylvania Avenue and then a late dinner at Minh’s Vietnamese restaurant in Arlington, Virginia. The Newseum is perfect for pre-teen and early teenage kids. First, there are a lot of visual displays like sections of the Berlin Wall and a damaged antenna from the World Trade Center 9/11 wreckage. Second, there isn’t a lot of reading of long descriptions and narratives – many of the exhibits are largely done around objects themselves or speak for themselves, like Pulitzer Prize winning photographs. And finally, the place is huge and has a plethora of gift shops with cool kid-oriented stuff – our purchase was a massive Uncle Sam-style plush hat that one of the boys wore all weekend; very patriotic! On the Fourth of July itself, we wisely avoided the downtown area and instead spent the day at the Smithsonian Air & Space Museum annex near Dulles Airport, the Udvar-Hazy facility. With IMAX films, an observation tower where you can see the big planes taking off from the airport, and plenty of real planes and space vehicles to view, it was the perfect place to spend the day. Highlights of this “museum” – which is really the size of multiple airplane hangars – included seeing the Concorde (ah, how I wish I had been able to fly on it when it was in service!), the F-22 Blackbird, the space shuttle Discovery, and the Enola Gay. The only real downside of Udvar-Hazy is that the only option for lunch there is a McDonald’s restaurant on site. And given that Udvar-Hazy is located pretty far from anywhere else, you can’t walk to another site. We settled for a late lunch at a local Mexican restaurant in nearby Chantilly as the thought of a Happy Meal was not well received by the foodie members of our touring group. More to follow in Part 2 . . . – Laura Flippin #arlingtonva #DLAPiper #WashingtonDC