Looking For Rod Serling

I'm in Washington D.C. for a week, wallowing in American History with my good friend Teacher Girl. She, like me, came to this career after a life of raising children, and so we have many things in common. We're having a total blast! We arrived early Thursday morning on the "red-eye". We took Metro to our hotel, dropped off our luggage, bought some bagels & juice, and then headed up to the Capitol to pick up tour tickets. The tour is free, but you must have a timed ticket. We had two hours before our turn, so we walked down to the botanical gardens, then the art galleries, and returned in time for our tour.

It is a spectacular building, full of historical imagery, and our tour guide was very charming and informative. And the capitol police have one of the most difficult jobs of law enforcement: balancing their very real concerns for the security of the building and those who work there, and maintaining access for the public--the stated owners and proprietors: We, the People.

After a several hours, we acknowledged the late hour, and our hunger and thirst. So we headed for a food court I knew of that didn't usually seem so far away as it did on this occasion. We arrived, ordered, sank into our chairs and consumed. All that was between us and our beds, those glorious soft, pillow rich, down-covered havens, was a brief Metro ride and a short walk across the street to our hotel door. By now, our lack of sleep, and the trudging up and down Capitol Hill, had completely drained us, and we were operating on automatic.

The train came to our stop. With great effort, we forced our exhausted legs to stand and shuffle off the car, following the crowd over to the escalator, we stepped on the tread and moved upward. We were both thinking, "Almost there, almost there." We carefully hoarded our last tiny sparks of energy so we'd have enough to walk across that street. Then, we stepped off the escalator, walked out of the Metro stop, froze, and simultaneously squeaked, "Where are we?!" I was so tired from the day of walking and not drinking or eating enough, that I couldn't wrap my brain around what was going on! We were SUPPOSED to be in front of our hotel. We were SUPPOSED to be able to trudge across the street, get in the elevator, and then drop into our beds. WHAT WAS GOING ON!!?? We felt like crying. It was a Twilight Zone moment. I half expected to hear Rod intoning as the credits came up...

I realized finally that we'd exited the Metro tunnel at the wrong end, and we needed to walk around the block to get to the right street. But we were so finished that even that seemed like too much, and--what if we walked the wrong way around the block and got further away!?

Surprisingly, we did have enough left to shuffle around the block and we saw the blessed sight of our hotel name glowing in the middle of the next block. We did make it, and the beds were every bit as wonderful as we'd anticipated. And the next day, we remembered to drink more water and eat more often, and it was a Capitol Fourth.