Monday

We returned safely to DC shortly after two thirty this morning. Outside Union Station there was a lone taxi-stand attendee with a long line of Sunday night travelers waiting for transport home. There were, however, very few cabs. Apparently the policeman's ball was last night and the majority of the city's cabs were transporting drunken cops to and fro, totally ignoring the train station. The attendant was a thickset man with black hair and a white beard, jovially making a hash of everything by rearranging the line into discrete groups with similar geographic destinations. We ended up going all the way to Shirlington before being returned Falls Church by three thirty. Our weekend in New York was great. We were there visiting longtime friends of Sunshine's. They put us up on a succession of inflatable mattresses in their beautiful apartment in an otherwise shabby Prospect Heights tenement. During our stay, we visited three of five boroughs, ate at five restaurants, rode at least five subway lines, and saw five circus freaks. I took almost five hundred photographs.* I'd never really been to NYC before: though I had driven through several times, this was my first real tourist venture there. Here's some stuff we did: took the Staten Island ferry, ate Coney Island funnelcakes, navigated Penn Station, and visited the Strand bookstore. Union square is a circle. We went to Ground Zero. I can see why people fall in love with--or at least obsess over--the place by writing songs and books and wearing I heart t-shirts. The city is a compellingly vibrant place that is tasty, smelly and a little touchy, a kaleidoscope of society crammed into a sometimes overwhelming sensual morass. I really liked it, and I'm afraid DC will seem a little duller, now. [Cavin]