Cherry Blossom Festival: 2010 Edition

Officially no problems getting there.  Yay.  When getting fare cards (the all day ones are well worth it) I discovered that my only money (a $20 bill) essentially couldn't be used to purchase one farecard as the machines will reject anything that makes them have to give out more than $5 in change.  Fortunately I wasn't the last in our group to get one so I just bought two with the promise of being paid back.

The fucked up shit happened right when we got out of the Federal Triangle station.  For whatever reason, some people were protesting.  Leave it to some people to turn an event based solely around cherry trees blooming into a political agenda.  I didn't really pay attention to them and ignored the person that tried to hand me a flier as I walked past.

Our first objective, as always, was food.  This is how I got paid back, essentially.  By receiving approximately $8.30's worth of food that I would have purchased had I not had to buy two metro passes.  It was closer to $8's worth of food, but who's counting?  Furthermore, where can you get anything for around 30 cents anymore?

After eating my takoyaki and taiyaki, and some chex mix for good measure, we started meandering our way around the festival.  One thing is important to note: to actually see what any given booth has at it, you have to sift your way through the crowd at that booth.  Even if you aren't interested in whatever it turns out that they have.  So naturally we're doing our best to scan from a distance to ascertain what everyone has, but also naturally we missed some things and had to go looking for them later.

Another thing that's important to note: everything available for purchase at this festival is overpriced.  No exceptions.

Honestly there isn't much to say.  We spent the day wandering from one end of Pennsylvania Ave. to the other and back.  Every time we went past the booth that had Guitar Hero 3 (seriously, GH3?  That game is oldsauce) I'd name the song that was being played.  Withdrawal's a bitch.

Eventually we decided to leave.  Part of leaving involved trolling one of our members.  It's difficult to explain, but I'll try.  Basically, it involved taking him into a sex shop without telling him that he was going into a sex shop, just to see his reaction.  Unfortunately, because of directions fail due to receiving second-hand directions, I didn't actually get to see the reaction.

Something incredibly weird happened when we were leaving the Vienna/Fairfax-GMU metro station.  My car has automatic seatbelts.  Normally the driver's side one moves up when I close the door.  It stayed put.  Even when I started the car.  No amount of opening and closing the door or turning off and restarting the car would make it budge.  lol i dunno ‾\O_o/‾

After the trolling, we decided to get some dinner and drove to the Olive Garden in Tyson's Corner.  I didn't know Olive Garden was classy enough to have a valet parking setup, but it sure as hell looked like one.  Narrow driveway going past the entrance with large parking lot further back.  The valet parking wasn't actually in service (thankfully, I wouldn't trust anyone in DC with my keys), so we parked ourselves and then I think we inadvertently trolled some random people there because there was a party of five being told there was a 20-25 minute wait but our party of 12 got seated immediately.

At this point, I was out of money, but I have nice friends who don't like to see their friends starve.  I went easy on Peaches and just got the endless salad ($5.65 for as much salad and breadsticks as you can eat, pretty damn good deal) and a Coke, which I got refills on as well.

Now it was dark so we headed home.  While picking up people I ended up with an energy drink (Amp), which actually worked 100% into my plans because I have this tendency to be falling asleep while attempting to drive the return trip from an event, even if I've just gotten up.  It also helped that one of my passengers stayed awake so I had someone to talk to.  I still ended up drinking the Amp, but it was between Gainesville and Charlottesville when I needed it as opposed to last year where I was already trying desperately to stay awake before I even got to Gainesville.

I'm going to have to get that seat belt fixed.  Thankfully I already got my car inspected.

Also, due to general wtfness from the roads while we were trying to sort out the second-hand directions failure, there may be an incoming rant on DC's signage and traffic patterns.  Spoiler: they suck.