Ian ran in the Army Ten-Miler with Don Huddler on Saturday October 23rd. There were 20,000 participants in this race, which wound its way through the streets of the capitol. On the way from Ann Arbor to D.C., we stayed with my folks in Pittsburgh. We got to spend some quality time with my folks, although I think we stayed longer than Ian meant to on Saturday morning.

Every other time I've been to D.C., I've been happy to let the other party drive. However, Ian and I have a well-honed tradition of me driving and him navigating. So although I had to drive in a big city, I didn't have to read a map, which was probably better for both of us.

Don and Vicki have only just moved to D.C.. from Ann Arbor. It is their compromise, since Vicki would prefer to live in Jersey, and Don would prefer North Carolina. They managed to find a fixer-upper in a family-friendly suburb of D.C. They paid dearly for it, and will have to spend a lot of time renovating it, but it suits their needs for now.

They are also just beginning new jobs, and are coming off the tail end of a very stressful period during which they were living apart so that Don could find a house, they were both looking for jobs, they had to move across the country, Vicki had to suddenly be hospitalized, and Don's Army job had totally screwed up his chance of getting a paycheck anytime soon. For two people having just come out of such a time of turmoil, they seemed surprisingly calm.

We took a very pleasant stroll to the local park. I held the baby, Ben, the whole way there and back. I surprised myself. I am not a baby person. I don't long to hold babies, and am usually happy to relinquish them when they cry for their parents. But Ben is such a quiet content little guy, there wasn't any time that I really wanted to give him back, even when my arms started getting really sore. I guess if all babies were as easy as Ben, I might be more enthusiastic about babies!

Back at the ranch, Vicki fixed a very tasty spaghetti sauce so that the boys could carb-load for their race the next day. Jason was torturing his baby brother just a little bit during dinner-fixing, but Ben didn't really seem to care. Jason got extremely wound up during dinner, but he never reached that really cranky phase that wound up children usually hit once the fun is over.

The next night, while I was in the guest room next door to Jason's, I heard Don reading a bedtime story to Jason. Then I heard Don leave the room and call for Vicki, saying he'd read Jason the riot-act and needed help. I thought that was pretty funny because I hadn't heard a thing. I guess that's about the quietest riot-act there ever was! Vicki came up and mopped up the situation, and again, I didn't hear a thing. Amazing.

The night before the race we did some planning. What neither Ian nor I had known was that Ian and Don would be getting up at 5:45 a.m. to get down town for an 8 a.m. race. We never get up that early, or even close. I had also planned to bicycle around town while they were running, but there was no way I was getting up that early or biking at 8 a.m.!

Then the next morning, we awoke to rain. I didn't get up until they guys were almost done running. We didn't know that they weren't being rained on while they ran, so we felt pretty badly for them. It turned out that they got lucky during the race, but it was cold and miserable before and after the race.

It was quite awhile before they got back to the house. I had really been hoping to make it into town, but it was already after noon, and obviously the guys would want to do nothing but lay around and recover. I tried to find out whether it would be feasible for me to bike into town, but it sounded a little dicey because of some of the areas I'd pass through.

Finally, I decided to take the Metro into town and just tool around by myself. Then Don very kindly offered to watch the boys so that Vicki could go with me. This was an unexpected treat for both of us, as it turned out. I'd just assumed that living here, Vicki could go into town whenever she felt like it. But I wasn't thinking like a mom who just moved to a new city and just got a new job. This was her first trip into town!

I'd wanted to go into Georgetown, so we figured out which Metro station to leave from, and which stop would land us closest to our destination. Once we reached street level, we were looking at a map to try to figure out which way we needed to go (we were dropped off at a circle).

Two men approached us, and one of them said (in a British accent) something like "This probably sounds presumptuous, but I need to find a good dyke to marry." I was really confused at first, because I'd once married to help out a foreign friend in need, so I thought he might be asking for advice. But then the "dyke" part just didn't make sense.

But Vicki had had other experiences which suggested to her that these men might be trouble, so she told them to get lost. They didn't disappear right away, and then it began to dawn on both of us that something really funny had just happened. We just weren't sure what!

I realized pretty quickly that these guys had taken us for a lesbian couple. She may never have been mistaken for a dyke, but I'm pretty sure I have, so this didn't come as a surprise, nor did it feel insulting. I pride myself in being able to "pass". But then we couldn't figure out whether they were toying with us, or were gay and were just being silly and friendly, or who knows what.

Either way, we got a big kick out of that. I kept thinking of funny things I could have said to them, had I been quicker on my feet. But it was too late. It looked like the area we'd landed in was a bit of a gay area - we saw other "real" couples.

It was great to be in a city again, especially one as nice as where we were in D.C. We wandered through a residential area that was all old brick, pretty colors, and wrought-iron. Don and Vicki had considered living somewhere like this, but it is just too expensive, and wouldn't have some of the features they wanted for the kids.

We reached the commercial district of Georgetown, and it just seemed to stretch on forever (compared to what I'm used to - small towns in Michigan). There were so many people of so many varieties - it was almost sensory overload. I could easily have spent hours just wandering around this street and observing.

We found a rib place that we'd read about and had some lunch there. It felt good to be sitting there in the middle of the day, having a beer and some savory meat, talking to an interesting person I'd never really gotten to know before.

That was one of the best parts of the trip. Don and Ian are total politics wonks. Vicki is certainly well-informed, and I am interested to a certain degree, but neither Vicki nor I want to talk about politics as much as Ian and Don do. So to have each other to talk to as an alternative worked out very well. And we weren't making idle chit-chat either - we had some good conversations.

Back at the house, hearing what the guys had spent the afternoon doing (recovering, remaining mostly immobile) I knew we'd done the right thing. Having been in Georgetown made me want to come back and spend several days in the city.

We all went to bed early, and unfortunately, I did not get up in time to say goodbye to our hosts. But I knew we'd be back - no question about it!