My Day In Our Nation's Capital

I've been in Lansdowne, Virginia for nearly two weeks now for my tax technical training. I'll spare you the details of that because it's just too exciting to talk about. But anyway, since we're only about an hour outside of Washington, we went on a big field trip to DC yesterday. We boarded 5 or 6 charter buses and got to DC just in time for lunch. Where do around 250 young tax professionals go for lunch in DC? Why the Shriner temple of course. Lunch was pretty good, but I couldn't get over the randomness of holding our lunch in a Shriner temple. (In case you're wondering, Shriners are the old guys who wear the red fezzes and collect money for the children's hospital. I wikipedia'd the Shriners and learned that Shriner is short for Ancient Arabic Order of the Nobles of the Mystic Shrine. They're an arm of the free masons and wikipedia mentioned nothing about tax associates.)

After lunch we had a whirlwind tour of DC. We saw the White House, Capital building, and all the memorials and monuments you could ever hope to look at for 5 minutes before getting bored and moving on to the next thing. The best part was our "expert tour guide" who provided color commentary as we went. Some of my favorite gems were: The Vietnam War ended in the mid-80s, the Korean War was fought after the North Vietnamese invaded South Korea, and 90 million people came to Washington DC for the opening of the Lincoln Memorial. The worst part was the weather. If you're ever planning on taking a walking tour of DC, I recommend that you do it when the temperature is above freezing.

After the walking tour, we had 15 minutes to kill before dinner, so we went to the National Portrait Gallery. We went there specifically to see the gallery of the presidents, but most of us were far more impressed by this:

Yes, that's Stephen Colbert. Hanging between the entrances to the men's and women's restroom, just steps from George Washington, is a portrait of Colbert, standing in front of a portrait of Colbert, standing in front of a portrait of Colbert. This is actually the only photo I took over the course of the entire trip.

From there we went to the Air and Space Museum. This was very cool. They rented out the whole museum, closed it to the public, and let us run wild. Ok, so there's not much opportunity to run wild in a place like the Air and Space Museum, but it was kind of fun to have the place to ourselves and to be able to wander the museum with a beer in hand.

The night wound down and we were more than ready to go when the buses picked us up around 10. We filed into the buses after a really long day, eager to get back. The ride was pretty uneventful for the first half hour, but then the bus mysteriously slowed down and pulled over on the side of the highway. Our first thought was that we were being pulled over, but when the bus came to a complete stop, the driver opened the door and bolted outside. He came back on a second later and started screaming for everyone to get off of the bus. He told us to grab whatever personal effects were close by, but to get off the bus as quickly as possible.

It was at this time that we began to smell smoke and the people in the back started screaming that the bus was on fire. As soon as I got outside, I could see the smoke billowing from the back of the bus. We all poured out onto the side of the highway and scrambled up the embankment to get away from the flaming bus and oncoming traffic. It must have been a site to see for people driving by: A flaming charter bus and 45 people in business casual attire climbing up the embankment towards the woods. Then the bus exploded. Ok, the bus didn't explode. Actually, the smoke eventually stopped and it was rather anticlimactic. The bus didn't explode, but it wasn't going anywhere and neither were we.

We stood around on the side of the highway - shivering - for about 20 minutes until a Marriott shuttle bus stopped to help. The only problem was that the Marriott bus was going the opposite direction on the highway and was separated from us by a concrete wall and swarming traffic. Our bus driver ran across the road to talk to the driver of the Marriott bus and we stood around discussing the possibility of a large scale, real life frogger game. Eventually our driver came back and told us that the Marriott bus was going to swing around and come back for us. He told us that we could wait on the warm Marriott bus, but we would have to wait on the side of the road until another charter bus could come pick us up.

It took him quite a while, (we were starting to think he changed his mind) but eventually the Marriott bus came back. About 10 of us boarded the Marriott bus and the rest of the group decided to just get back on the original bus. We sat around for a few minutes and then our driver boarded and told us that we were going to go in the Marriott bus to a garage nearby and wait for a charter bus. At this point I was no longer willing to cooperate. I was not about to let a random stranger drive me to a random garage in a random city. That was not going to fly with me. I was about to call a cab when one of our charter buses pulled up and saved the day. We got off the Marriott bus, boarded the new charter bus, and were back to the conference center around 11:45.

So in conclusion, what I learned from my trip to DC is that the Shriners are a fez-wearing sect of the masons, don't trust DC tour guides, Stephen Colbert is kind of awesome, and hanging out on the side of a highway next to a flaming bus is not as cool as you might think.