Well, as nice as Christmas Eve was, Christmas day was a bust. We had plans and were thwarted on many levels. Our first plan was to go to a beach. We figured everything else would be closed, so we looked up beaches, and went to unlock our car, but the keys didn't work. Weird. Then Coadster got in and tried to start the car, but the battery was dead. Bummer. Then we got out our portable battery charger. Stinky hooked it up and I reminded her about which color goes on the negative and which went on the positive. She said she knew. The car wasn't charging and then all of a sudden, the portable charger popped and expanded like Jiffy Pop and broke its plastic case. Crap.
I called John all distraught, and he said to give him a minute and he'd get back to me. I had no idea how possible it would be to even find a garage open on Christmas Day in Washington D.C., let alone how much they would gouge the price of a tow and whatever work they'd have to do on the car.
John texted me back and told me he signed us up for AAA and I should call a tow truck driver. The guy got to my car in 20 minutes. Ran a test on my car and said everything was good, except the battery needed to be replaced. He had an entire truck full of batteries and luckily, one small enough for a Honda Fit. He didn't charge for installation and the battery itself cost me $130. Not too bad.
After the car got fixed up, we took off to find a beach. When I lived in California, there were plenty of open beaches that you parked or walked to at any time and swam or ran or hiked or whatever. Apparently, things are different in the D.C area. We drove for about 3 hours and all the beaches were closed for Christmas. Wah.
We had already bought tickets to see a movie at 5, so we had just about a half hour to go to Arlington Cemetery (the only place we could find that was open on Christmas Day). We weren't able to see the changing of the guard, but we did get to see JFK and Jackie O's graves.
Our day of being thwarted continued, however. We foolishly thought we could drive and park at the theater where we planned to see our movie. I bought tickets on-line. So, we headed to the theater and could not find one single parking place, and every parking garage was closed. That's another thing that doesn't happen in Iowa City - closed parking garages.
We finally found apparently the one open garage, parked and ran to the theater. By that time, the movie was just starting and since it was sold-out, we had to sit in the seats directly under the screen. have you ever done that before? It's enough to make you puke when they do a faster pan of a room. The only consolation was that from below, the actors looked chubby. I've never seen Emma Stone look fat before, and Ryan Gosling's nose was HUGE from that angle. It was a real confidence booster for us.
After the movie, we decided to cut our losses and just head back to our apartment. We ordered Chinese delivery and watched "Home Alone" and "Natural Treasure". Man if I didn't think "National Treasure" was full of shit before we went to D.C., I sure did afterward. So, they're looking for a map on the back of the Declaration of Independence, huh? Which one? There are 26 copies around and maybe the map was on one of the 200 or so that were originally produced. Not to mention the fact that you can't just walk up to the one they have in the National Archives all by yourself and hang out with it. Derrrrr.
Anyway, so Christmas wasn't the best day I've had in my life, it wasn't awful and it was definitely the only really bad day on our trip. We are pretty damn lucky.
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