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Message to D.C.
Visitors… Be Respectful
By Susan Olling
This contribution was intended to be about another topic, but something
from the Midwest changed it.
For all tourists who drive to D.C. and plan to park on the National
Mall or the Tidal Basin, be warned. The days of free parking will
end on Monday, June 12. About eleven hundred parking spaces on
the Mall and the Tidal Basin will be metered. Drivers will have
to pay $2.00 per hour to park in these spaces between 7:00 a.m. and
8:00 p.m. Except on December 25, when the only open/staffed
touristy site on the National Mall is the U.S. Botanic Garden. Oh
yes, there’s a three-hour time limit for the space.
Why? Apparently to encourage tourists to use Metro and to
encourage turnover in those parking spaces. Not to worry: there
is still free parking available. In East Potomac Park and down by
Hains Point. A far piece for American tourists who are notorious
for complaining about how much walking they do when they come
here. The National Park Service, who announced all this about six
weeks ago, plans to begin enforcement right away. I can’t
wait. I’m thinking of taking a chair, finding a good place, and
watching the festivities unfold.
Tourists will have to plan better if they ride our little subway system
starting June 25. Fares will increase; and service hours will
decrease. Stations will close at 11:30 p.m. Monday through
Thursday, at 1 a.m. Friday and Saturday nights and at 11 p.m. on
Sundays. Metro will open at 8:00 a.m. on Sundays. The new hours
will impact riders for at least the next two years.
What’s as noxious as that ridiculous O-H-I-O formation? That
cacophonous OH-IO chant. I had forgotten about this other piece
of nonsense until it surfaced in a national memorial, where it has no
place. There was a group of middle schoolers from Buckeye-dom at
the World War Two Memorial a few weeks ago who apparently thought that
the Ohio column was a good place to start OH-IOing. Guess the
chaperones thought this was acceptable. A park ranger brought
this egregious behavior to a stop with a succinct lecture on respect in
a national memorial. Two wonderful adult visitors, not part of
the group, watched all this. They thanked the ranger and told him
they didn’t know how rangers “could put up with this s***”.
Well put. School groups have become more and more disrespectful
when they visit here, and that behavior has brought an increasing
number of comments from visitors whose vacations did not include school
groups who don’t know how to behave in national memorials. The
comments are not complimentary, in case there are school administrators
or teachers reading this. If schools can’t find responsible
chaperones, why do they continue to inflict the little dears on
us? Ohioans seem to be excessively proud of Buckeye-nut
land, but you’ll do the rest of us a huge favor by leaving the
above-mentioned antics back in Ohio.
The hordes of school groups, both middle and high school aged, are
still coming as of this writing. Three adults, a dad and
two sons (all firefighters), were visiting the Korean War Veterans
Memorial when dad told the park ranger that he had to get away from all
the disrespectful kids and that teachers aren’t teaching respect for
national memorials. Is he right about the last bit? All of
the adults who bring the school hordes to D.C. are responsible for the
way their kids behave. Teachers probably do prepare their kids
for these trips, but that preparation is non-existent when the urchins
arrive and start marauding. Do they remember much about their
trips? Probably not.
Another thing I’ve noticed over the years at the Vietnam Veterans
Memorial are tourists who put people, sometimes kids, on their
shoulders and let them do name rubbings at the taller panels.
Dangerous and stupid. It can get crowded at that memorial, and
the walkway surface is anything but smooth. Ask a park
ranger or volunteer to do the job.
We’ve been seeing quite a few enormous RVs towing very large
SUVs. Glad someone wants to spend money on those gas
guzzlers. In our house, traveling in an RV is not considered a
vacation.
Rhetorical question: how many of us have used our drivers’ licenses as
proof of identification recently? Drivers who live in the
nation’s capital have my sympathy in this situation. For a few
years now, the current licenses say “District of Columbia”. This
has been causing confusion. Some Americans don’t seem to know
where the District of Columbia is. Shouldn’t surprise
anyone. The motor vehicle department in D.C. will soon be
changing drivers’ licenses to read “Washington, D.C.”
If people don’t know that Washington, D.C. and the District of Columbia
are one and the same, there’s a bigger problem than what’s at the top
of those pieces of plastic.
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