My girlfriend (at the time) and I were about as excited as two sixtysomethings can get. It was 2020, and we’d booked a visit to Washington, DC, the first time for both of us. Sweetening the pot for our trip to the nation’s capital was that Donald Trump was in the Oval Office. Once it was agreed upon in March of that year, I got on the phone. I purchased two round-trip Alaska Airlines tickets for a great price, as our trip was planned for months later, on the week of the Fourth of July. It was our intention to attend the holiday celebration on Capital Mall, broadcast each year on the late Public Broadcasting System as A Capitol Fourth. We never missed it on TV, and now we’d see it live.
It gets better: former Creedence Clearwater Revival frontman/guitarist John Fogerty and the Temptations were among the performers.
Researching the downtown core I decided on the Capital Hilton and booked three nights. We were going to visit everything we could cram into three days, big draws like the White House, the Capitol Building, the Washington Monument, the Lincoln and Jefferson Memorials, and the Smithsonian Museum. My girlfriend and I were self-employed, so time off was a gimme. I didn’t opt to rent a car; everything seemed walkable.
Note: I do remember reading a safety advisory the hotel included on its general information page, to the effect that downtown was reasonably safe and that getting back to the hotel after dark would be prudent. I thought nothing of it, figuring the advice could be applied to the majority of America’s big cities.
And then the Covid pandemic began. We hung onto the dream as long as we could, but the viral dominos began to fall. People were dying all over the planet. And DC was shutting down. The monuments and museums closed. Masks—later proved ineffective—were required everywhere. The live Capitol Fourth was cancelled; all artists would perform remotely.
I got on the phone again. Never have reservations been easier to cancel. Even though it was late, the airline and hotel credited my card with no questions asked. I recall that the Alaska Airlines representative asked if I wanted to keep a credit on the books for when the pandemic lifted. The way things looked in mid-June 2020, no deal.
In November of that year, Joe Biden was elected. Without getting into the federal governmental horror show or the myriad Covid controversies that ensued, which I’ve written about, there was no way, even as the pandemic abated, that we wished to be anywhere near the Washington during his term. Since then, DC, plagued before Trump by the same problems that beset any Democrat-run big city downtown, has become a crime and homelessness-ridden rathole.
It remains to be seen, though my confidence in Trump is warranted due to the problem-solving abilities he’s demonstrated in his second term, if the dream can come alive again.