Hey ! See D.C.!

Readers of the Luann comic strip are currently reading of a school trip to Washington, D.C. I am more interested in the unlikely romance between Luann's goofy brother Brad and the hottest comic character since Nancy. I'm talking about Toni Daytona here! And just like on the tv sitcom King of Queens, the writers give 1/2-assed men the hope that they, too, can wind up with a beautiful woman just by being awkward jackanapes.

But, again, they're letting that romance simmer on the back burner while Luann and her school mates and parents go to DC to see the sights.

We who live in Baltimore are just a hop-skip-and jump from these sights and yet it's safe to say that without the third-and-eighth-grade class trips down the Baltimore Washington Parkway, most of them would be sights unseen for most of us.

I'll tell you about the last time we went there, almost 15 years ago. We had dropped friends off at the Baltimore-Washington Airport early one morning, and since it was so early, I said to Peggy, "Let's head on down to DC and hit the Smithsonian and see the famous cultural relics, such as Dick Clark's dais, Fonzie's leather jacket and Archie Bunker's easy chair." Always accommodating, Peggy was up for it, and so we soon found ourselves as just one of over 27 million cars all headed for our nation's capital at sunrise.

Arriving just past 2 PM (joke - it took about an hour, tops) we immediately got lost. I recently wove that story into another entry, but after we got away from the neighborhood in which we first landed, an area that appeared to be in the running for the Dresden look-alike finals, we miraculously found a spot at a parking meter right in front of the Smithsonian. We passed a pleasant-enough day in the museum and headed home in the early afternoon. Wishing to avoid another delay by getting lost on the banks of the Styx, we asked a man riding shotgun in a DC police car for directions to I-95. He gave us such good directions that we were out of DC faster than Dick Cheney three weeks ago! And it was to be several months before I saw that police officer again. The next time, a flattering likeness of him appeared in the Washington POST under the headline "DC POLICE CHIEF RESIGNS IN CORRUPTION SCANDAL." I hope he got a job with AAA - he was really great at directions.

But for most of us in Baltimore, they might as well build a moat around DC. When the Colts were stolen from us by a thief in the night, people from out of town said, "Well, you have a pretty good team 40 miles down the road. Why not become Redskin fans?"

Uh, no. It just can't happen.

The price of living in DC is so crazy that many people with jobs in DC are reverse-commuting - living in Baltimore and commuting morning and night. These people sure have time to enjoy the best of Baltimore, by crackey! They have to be on the road by no later than 6 AM to even have a shot at being in DC by 8, and I guess they leave Washington around 5 and get back home here by 8, just in time to hit the hay and get ready to do it all over again.

I wish Luann and her posse a whole lot of fun in DC. There is a lot to see, and sometimes I feel bad for living so close to a major ocean and the center of the free world, while farm children in Blue Earth, MN, hold bake sales to try to get here to see an ocean or an unindicted bigshot. But then I think of that traffic and I am content with the wonders of Baltimore, where peaceful waters flow.

My solution: live in Baltimore. Work in Baltimore. Love Baltimore. We love you!