ROLLING THUNDER

May 27, 2012     After our disastrous Friday, we spent yesterday as a down day around the rig.  Lazy breakfast, read the Washington Post, gave each other haircuts (drawing quizzical looks from passersby), laundry, and sponging bugs off the rig (no full washing allowed).  The park emptied out a lot on Thursday, but its starting to fill up again and is projected to be full for the Memorial Day celebration.  Dinner was spaghetti & meat sauce.

Today, Sunday, we took our usual transit downtown to watch the Rolling Thunder parade of motorcycles.  This has become an annual event, and we even thought of participating on the scoot (Rolling Thimble?) but the breakdown squelched that idea.  Probably would have been not a very good idea, as we would have been, as late entries, at the back of the pack.  And how big was that pack?  Try a quarter of a million bikes.  Yup, 250,000 were scheduled!  They start out at the Pentagon, where they stage, then follow a set route down Constitution Avenue, the Capitol, and finish at the Tidal Basin area.

Of course, the metro picked this weekend to shut our primary line for repairs at one point, so we had to bus to a more distant station, ride a few stops, bus to another station, then finish on the metro to downtown.  The parade had long started by the time we got there, but not to worry, the endless flow of bikes, mostly Harleys, was slowly streaming by.

Many of the bikes were decked out with real or pseudo patriotic regalia:

As you can imagine, a little of this goes a long way.  I made a brief video, which seems to have a freeze-glitch at the 12 second mark; just move your mouse around a bit to get it moving.  After 45 minutes or so, we’d had enough.  It was very hot and the parade was just more of the same.  We decided to bail and head to a museum.  We hadn’t finished with the National Gallery of Art so we went back there.  I’ll be merciful and spare you:  no more pics of paintings.  After we had spent another 2 1/2 hours at the museum, we came out to find the parade still going on as if we hadn’t left it.  These weren’t bikes making multiple passes;  everyone got one go-round.  But 250,000 cycles takes a l-o-o-o-o-o-ng time to pass.  With the heat, we just had a big dinner salad once we got home.  Lettuce, potatoes, beans, squash, broccoli, red pepper, onion, tomato, and crumbled bacon.  Yumm.  We’re running low on groceries, so we’ll have to figure out how to go shopping without the scoot.

Monday was Memorial Day and the temps in D.C. got close to 100.  Our indoor rig thermometer registered 97!  A traditional parade was planned for the afternoon, so we decided to spend the morning at Arlington cemetery.  Again with the repairs to the metro, it took us 1 1/2 hours to get there. 

We arrived at Arlington to find the roads closed and tons of police all over.  Aha!  Of course, today’s when the President places a wreath at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier.  As we were making our way on foot, his motorcade swung out and came down the avenue right next to us.  Loni says she saw him waving at us, but as I was working the camera I didn’t catch it.  What an ugly limo.

We started our visit at the new Women In Military Service For America Memorial, which is located in the building at the end of the boulevard on which the President is traveling above.

and set out to find an entry about Mom, who served as a Wave in WWII, stationed in Jacksonville, Florida at the Naval Air Station.  They have a raft of keyboard/monitor stations where you can type in the pertinent info and locate your veteran.  Took a couple of tries, and some asking at the desk, but we got it to work and, voila!  There she was.

We ended up buying a bunch of WAVE-related trinkets, and a copy of this posting, and gave them to Mom and Christmas.

We gave up on the rest of the cemetery for today.  It was brutally hot, and we had to walk back to downtown for the parade.  We started hoofing it, but bailed on that idea as we passed the entrance to the metro, and took that instead.  We established our beachhead on the curb, and settled in to view the parade. 

It pretty much was a larger-scale version of what you’d see at any parade in the country.

Lots of marching formations,

bands galore from high school to military, period costumes, vehicles looking like they just escaped from the Red Square,

and my favorite, always, the bagpipes.

The grand marshal of the parade was good old Chuck Yeager, an American icon if ever there was one.

Then the usual grab bag:  astronaut Buzz Lightyear Aldrin, a B-52 flyover, and the reviewing stand.  And stand they did, for the whole dang thing.

We cut out before the end in order to beat the mob back to the metro, and made it back to the rig in good time.  Loni made flounder with a carrot risotto, washed down with COLD beer!  God bless America.