From DC to North Carolina

The 5.00 a.m. waking does seem to be our pattern, as it often is, so I got up and used the coffee machine in the room to make some coffee. Then I uploaded photos to Flickr and updated the blog. Drew, who enjoys pre-dawn walks, decided he was going to go to do one in Washington and said he would head over to the Lincoln Memorial. It is why we have a pre-dawn picture of it and a dawn picture of the Washington Monument.

On his walk Drew had spotted a coffee shop that was two doors away from the hotel, the opposite direction from the Church. So we decided to have breakfast there. We had chocolate muffin (Drew) and wheat bagel with creamed cheese. We washed this down with two large Americanos. While on the issue of americanos this is the first visit to the US where lots of places do this drink - i.e. an espresso topped up with water. Most Americans seem to prefer drip coffee and compared to European coffee they drink mellow flavours (where mellow means not much). So it is nice to see the European coffee culture - with a stronger flavour to the coffee - coming back. Indeed the word americano seems to have originated from US troops coming to Europe and watering down their coffee, so I guess this is a truly transcontinental story. Still this morning's coffee was really tasty.

We checked out of the Melrose at 9.30 p.m. and went across town to the Hertz Car Rental at the Verizon Centre on 7th Street. The pleasant man who served us clearly was not used to UK driving licenses. He had to ask me my surname, as he couldn't spot it (it is on the second line of the license). He also asked Drew's surname as the second driver and even when Drew spelt out Olden, he still couldn't find the first names - so for this trip Drew has become Charles Olden! Unlike most Hertz places where you have to go down to a garage to collect the car, this one had the cars delivered out on to the street outside. 


The whole process of collecting the car took about an hour. The person in the queue in front of us was getting very worked up by the time, but we were happy to wait as our car was washed, prepared and delivered to us. So it was time to drive off. The google map I'd created before the holiday looked like travelling down 7th street would be easy, however, this did not take account of the fact that the car was facing up 7th street not down, so we had to take five left turns before getting onto Constitution Ave, as per the map. Still it meant we drove past the Washington Memorial and the other buildings on the Mall before leaving the city.

So for today's route. Four years ago, when we were in California, we stopped at a place called Fort Bragg, it was a lovely sea-side town with some great restaurants, but Drew was disappointed that it wasn't the Airborne and Special Ops base of the same name. Hence when choosing to come to North Carolina, to pick up an extra state, we just had to come make sure we stopped at Fayetteville, the home of Fort Bragg. 

There were two options open to us, a direct route from Washington to Fayetteville via the I95 or a less direct route along roads that take you places, rather than by-pass them. So we opted to travel to Fayetteville along the Seminole Trail.
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This travelling through little out of the way places is what we love about holiday's in the US. The serendipity of what you encounter is always a pleasure. Today it was grass cutting time, so we passed at least twenty grass cutting machines along the side of the road. Unlike in the UK, when it is a variety of bugs that hit your windscreen, in Virginia it was some really beautiful butterflies which seemed to want to dive-bomb us. In about 2 hours we saw 60 or 70 of them of all different hues.

We stopped for lunch in a place called Culpeper, finding a Starbucks just off the route. We had a sandwich and panini and another two americanos. Drew was being artistic with the photo as you can see. 

We travelled through Greta and Danville and on to the North Carolina State Line. Our first new state of the holiday - one down, five to go!

An hour later and we arrived at the Comfort Inn, Fort Bragg, Fayetteville. What a lovely day, with so much to see along the way.