Community Chat

[Magenta]

Starting on Thursday they started to arrive in the Nation's Capital, and many of them passed by my address, so starting to be really hard it being late at night and being woken up.

I had a European group for tours last night and this morning. The inner city was to be closed off for regular traffic starting 11 or 11:15 a.m. today. So i started my day at getting up at 5, made it out the door at 7 to catch the metro, having to meet my group at Artlington National Cemetary at 8 a.m. Objective of the day was to be able to do a full city tour and yet be on time for them to enjoy the Rolling Thunder bikers especially with the back grop of the U.S. Capitol and drop them off at the museums w/o too much walking. We did all the sites (lots of extra walking as the buses were not permited to ride down the regular streets even early on.) Just as we turned the last corner before being able to drop them at Air & Space Museum - click - the police closed the very streets behind our bus. I was so relieved, we did it! And they had time to get a coffee and stand there on time to experience it for themselves at the U.S. Capito!!

The people (from the Netherlands) had at their hotel started conversations with the Bikers and enjoyed that a lot. They were shown their motor bikes and were thrilled. Then later they saw them indeed riding the motors in front of the Capitol and, once again, they had a most wonderful time and with my additional information they learned what this was all about, at times seeing men forming circles and praying impromptu near the Vietnam War Memorial, very emotional and touchy, especially since many of the Veterans had put flowers there.

My only regret was that we didn't see S a r a h P. come by on the back of a bike, as she had planned to be in the midst of the bikers. But there was a picture already of her in the Washington Post, in case you too would want to see that.

Anyway, this was my job today and given the feedback, a job well done, fortunately as these experiences are now brought back to Europe where they for a long time will be remembering them.

What did you do today?

magenta