HE SAID

I’ll tell you straight up: this wasn’t a comfortable trip. I like comfort when I travel, and DC in a heat wave, fenced off for security, packed shoulder to shoulder for the Great American State Fair, was not that. But I’d do it again in a heartbeat — just not on these dates.

The drive up was the easy part. Six hours of catching up with Irene on family stuff, gone before I noticed. The drive home is where things got memorable for the wrong reasons: her feet were killing her from all the walking, so she peeled off her shoes and put her feet — bare, well-traveled — directly on my dashboard. I asked her not to. She informed me her feet were swelling and this was happening regardless. Reader, it happened regardless. If you’re planning a road trip with a sibling, that’s the kind of thing you find out about each other real fast — and honestly, it’s part of why the drive never got boring. We move at different speeds and negotiate everything, which made for a very “us” kind of trip.

The moment that’s stuck with me wasn’t the fireworks — it was standing in the crush of a security line after everyone got evacuated for lightning. Tens of thousands of people, kids and strollers included, waiting in the rain to get back in, and nobody was rude. A National Guard soldier was getting visibly frustrated with the crowd pushing forward, so I told him thanks for his service. He calmed down, said thanks for the support, and that was that. A few minutes later, “America the Beautiful” started drifting over from the stage, the Washington Monument lit up like a flag behind it, and the whole line just started singing.

The flyovers were the physical highlight. I was mid-beer at a Budweiser bar near the fairgrounds when the president’s plane came in low with two escorts. I didn’t see it before I felt it. It nearly dropped me to my knees.

On the speech itself — I want to keep this matter-of-fact, and that’s how it’s staying here. There was a stage, a longer-than-expected speech that focused on honoring veterans rather than politics, music, and then fireworks.

I put this trip at a 7.5 — not higher, because comfort matters to me and this had none; not lower, because the moments that landed (the flyovers, the singing, the National Guard exchange) were once-in-a-lifetime. I won’t be around for the 300th, and I’m glad I made this one count. This was also its own kind of in-between-years trip: not a couples getaway, not a multi-generational family trip, just my sister and me making time for something that mattered to us both.