Spent Saturday morning at a friend’s home in Silver Spring for brunch, enjoying the wonderful food and company. On the way home, to our surprise, we experienced a HUGE delay on the inner loop of the beltway as we headed towards Branch Avenue. Being the savvy commuters we are, we decided to ditch the beltway for local roads, specifically Ritchie-Marlboro Road towards Route 301 to come into Brandywine the back way. To our dismay, the back way was also jam packed with what I thought to be a very nasty accident. As we drove past the droves of police cars, crime scene tape, and plain clothes detectives, I began to wonder what REALLY went on that morning at the intersection of Route 4 and Route 301 in Prince Georges County.

After we finally arrived home some two hours later, we found out the real story… damn, a couple hours earlier and we would have been able to see the action, shootout and all. Bottom line, none of the bystanders were hurt but one of the robbery suspects died of “self inflicted wounds”. That’s what we’re talking about, high crimes, the Prince Georges County way. In all seriousness, though, we should be thankful that nobody was hurt in the crossfire, especially given the amount of traffic on Route 301 at any given time of the day. Wow, that’s some serious shit.

On the Maryland side, commuters will still use the OLD bridge and get to watch the demolition crews breaking up what used to be the other half of the old bridge… not exactly the most comforting feeling in the world as you sit on a bridge with thousands of other cars, 50 feet above the Potomac as construction crews happily DESTROY the other half of the very bridge you’re driving on.

All in all, a rather unremarkable experience. I didn’t see any walkways on the bridge for pedestrians (it would be a great view, overlooking the Potomac), but it did appear as though the bridge would have a “middle” lane, perhaps an HOV or HOT lane until Metro occupies it? Sitting in an 8 mile back-up also afforded me the opportunity to view many interesting bumper stickers and such, the top one being a bumper sticker on some woman’s Scion that read “I Heart My Big Fake Boobs”… never got a chance to pull up along side to substantiate, though. Such is life.. stuck in traffic.

Wednesday brought us gorgeous weather and a group of my friends and I decided to celebrate the occasion by taking advantage of Weather or not Wednesday at the rooftop deck of the Clarendon Ballroom. A dollar cover charge gains you admission to the rooftop bar to take advantage of one dollar bottles of Miller Lite through happy hour. Suffice to say, the dollar beers were VERY popular, as evidenced by the sheer volume of people that were at the bar that night. After 8 p.m., the happy hour crowd cleared out and we were better able to enjoy the beautiful weather and the Yuengling on tap.

On this day in 1865, President Abraham Lincoln was assassinated in what was then dubbed as the “crime of the century”. John Wilkes Booth, an actor, was known to be a Confederate sympathizer and was involved in an original plot to kidnap President Lincoln and take him to Richmond to be held captive as ransom to secure the release of Confederate prisoners of war being held in Union prison camps. The plans to capture President Lincoln ended in failure and three weeks later, Gen. Robert E. Lee surrendered to Union forces commanded by Gen. Ulysses S. Grant. The surrender must have been the impetus behind Booth’s decision to carry out his fatal deed and on the evening of the 14th of April, as President Lincoln sat in the Ford Theater, John Wilkes Booth shot and killed the President of the United States.

He escaped the city through Southern Maryland, in a route that took him through Clinton, Maryland in Prince Georges County. On the way out of the DC, he stopped by the Surratt Tavern to pick up weapons before heading off to his final destination in Virginia. The Surratt House still exists today as a museum and the Surratt Society holds a John Wilkes Booth escape route tour every year during the spring and in the fall. As you might imagine, the spring tours have already been filled up for 2006, especially the planned April 15th tour. The tour is 12 hours long and costs $60.

That said, I am a bit surprised that none of the VA interchanges made the list, though. I recall that not too long ago, the Springfield Interchange was listed as one of the most dangerous interchanges in the country, but that’s probably changed thanks to the Springfield Interchange Improvement Project. Of course, being dangerous and impeding commerce are two separate (but related) issues, so maybe it really isn’t a surprise?

Maybe the time is right to sell the company, though… especially given the fact that gas prices are expected to go through the roof this summer. Last I remember, it’s not exactly very easy to walk to either Potomac Mills or to Arundel Mills.

It was just too beautiful of a day to pass up a lunch time walk yesterday and I decided head across the Key Bridge from Rosslyn into Georgetown with my trusty camera. Based on the numbers of people that were out doing the same thing, it’s hard to believe that DC ranks so low in the top 100 best walking cities survey.

I went back to the office feeling much better for having achieved some level of exercise and I snapped a good amount of pictures on the way as well. To top it all off, though, I finally satiated my need to find out the name of the park at the foot of the Key Bridge in Georgetown… Francis Scott Key Park. Duh, Key Bridge, Key Park, makes perfect sense, doesn’t it? I can be such a dolt sometimes.