Day 1 - Toronto + Washington DC

Day 1 - Toronto + Washington DC #dcjordan2022

Here we go again! This time were flying on my wife's birthday (today) to DC then to Jordan on Christmas Day, very festive travel season isn't it

Now on the Uber to get to the airport (pretend that's in strikethrough text) the UP Express train, normally we would have gone directly but it's rush-ish hour and Uber got a bit feisty and wanted $140 instead of the normal like $60 so we're going to the train station

Had a bit of a scare where i thought I'd be roped into a rollback at work right as we were leaving but luckily I didn't have much to do

Now as to this trip, we're going to Jordan for wife's brother's wedding so that's the (redux) part of the header given that we went in the summer for her cousin's. Luckily (unluckily for them?) no other "close enough" family member seems to have a wedding in the cards...🙏🙏

But given the general reluctance to go to Jordan in the first place we decided to try and delay our arrival as much was socially creditably acceptable so we're doing some chill DC sightseeing until the 25th.

Figured it was a decent place given it's winter and museums are weather-proof mostly, also she's never been so it's a good stop-over that gets us out of a couple of family gatherings and gives us some just-us vacation time which has been in short supply this year

Anywho it's rush hour alright.

Now waiting for the train

Past security, tech is wild, Nexus machines at the airport no longer even ask you anything or take your fingerprints, they just use facial recognition, I didn't even have to give it my passport or my Nexus card it was just like "take a picture, okay welcome to the United States"

Now plane boarding time, it's one of the small ones

So we took off with some warnings there'd be some turbulence and the situation in DC was being "monitored". Also due to that we left like 30mins late. We did have a fair amount of turbulence close to Washington where we were later told.

We were in a holding pattern over as conditions were "deteriorating rapidly" at Washington. So then we hear the fun announcement we're getting re-routed from Reagan (DCA) to Dulles (IAD) but "hey, at least it's not Pittsburgh" which... Fair.

So we landed and it's raining pretty heavily and were told we'd find out what to do once the gate agents figure out what's happening. I had no roaming because i hadn't downloaded an esim in advance (tehe) so at some point i asked someone for a tether.

Used the tether and downloaded the sim my brother sent in an excruciatingly slow 220KB image download and activated it, said thank you to the guy that set up the tether and then... It didn't connect which is great.

While waiting to get off the pilot said we'd have the option to leave there (thank god we did US customs in Canada) or get back on to fly to Reagan airport.

But they were also like "your checked baggage is going through to your final destination so if you want it stay on the plane", so that made our choice easy. We finally deplaned briefly, had to take our gate checked carryons out, then back in lol.

Now waiting and hoping the SIM card magically connects but not looking great for that so I'm typing offline while waiting. Then it took 15 mins to fly to the other airport, probably the shortest flight I've ever done.

Now in a taxi on the way to the hotel... Finally. We got to skip almost the whole line because apparently there's DC-only taxis and Virgina etc taxis and no one in the long taxi line was going downtown. Almost there...

Cute hotel, nice front desk and finally here at 1am about 3 hours after we were supposed to but at least we made it! Sleep time for museuming tomorrow.