Walking in D.C. (With My Feet Two Inches Off the Ground)

My feet hurt.

I've just returned from my fourth trip (in 25 years) to Washington D.C. There is a LOT to see in D.C., all built of limestone, marble and bronze, and scattered over a "pedestrian" area roughly the size of Montana. Predictably, hotels are not cheap here so the discerning tourist stays in Maryland or Virginia and takes the metro in to sightsee. The metro system covers more than 100 miles and has more escalators (most of them inexplicably stationary) than any other transit system in the world and two of the longest in the world to boot.

I went with two friends--one who'd never been to D.C. and another who had been only once. I'll call them Patience and Prudence. Patience has lost 40 pounds this last year and works out more than she eats. Prudence has lost 60 pounds in the last two years and cannot stand still due (she claims) to back problems.

My guess is that over the course of the five days in D.C., I walked 120 miles and climbed two million stairs. We would have walked more but I convinced Patience and Prudence to wait for the next metro train instead of starting down the track to get a headstart. I prudently pointed out to Patience that one of the rails had a small electric charge in it that might make her hair curl. I patiently pointed out to Prudence that we could always make up for the four minutes "standing around doing nothing" while we waited for the next train by getting off a stop earlier and walking further to our destination.

While my knees held up very well, my calves and feet did not. As I lay on my sofa bed in our hotel "suite" (I stupidly volunteered to take the bad bed due to Prudence's bad back and Patience's offer to compensate me financially), my calves would alternately tense up then burn like fire. By day four, I had a blister on my fourth toe approximately the size of my...fourth toe. It was so large that the Post Office gave it its own ZIP code and Jefferson County decided to tax it as personal property.

Before this trip, I liked escalators. They represent a chance to rest your weary feet, to take an easy ride to the surface. But neither Prudence nor Patience believed in standing on an escalator. They, instead, walked up (or down) them, perhaps to get to their destination first, fighting to be the first through the metal detector to get into the Smithsonian, the Capitol, the Washington Monument or the public restrooms.

Patience and Prudence did have an altercation over the use of cell phones in certain areas where respect was required, and I must admit I lost my cool once as we tried to find the hotel at 10 p.m. in a cold rain after emerging from the metro to a street corner we'd never before seen while dragging our suitcases and looking at a piss-poor street map. I also discovered that Patience and Prudence did not want to watch "Little Couple," "18 Kids and Counting," "Jon and Kate Plus Eight" or "Amazing Spider Women" (about Siamese twins). Thank God I had my own TV in the hotel...