Back into the States!

Getting back to the States did little to calm my travel schedule. I flew from Quito to Atlanta, bailed on my Atlanta to San Diego flight and instead hopped on one bound for Washington DC. My brother Mike picked me up and we went straight to the Georgetown convocation where I found out he had a fan club of girls screaming his name from across the parking lot. I guess one of the benefits of being 6’4” is you don’t need a mohawk to stand out. I met a bunch of Mike’s friends, ate some good Mexican which I had been craving for months, and drank some bad college beer to round out the night.
Rebecca, my sister, came down from my parents’ house in the Philly suburbs the next day. We were all pretty excited to get together since all three siblings hadn’t been in the same place at once in 5 years. We’ve been able to hang out one on one a few times, but we haven’t all been in the same location since 2006 when we were all at very different points in our lives. We decided to mark the occasion by going to every T-mobile and Radio Shack store in the greater Georgetown area looking for a phone battery. It was a glorious celebration.
Later that evening was Georgetown’s Senior Ball. I put on a formal outfit comprised entirely of borrowed cloths, while Mike and Rebecca, having not lived out of a backpack the preceding 3 months, put on their own dress attire.
Now I didn’t go to any of CU’s graduation functions, but then again CU doesn’t rent out the single busiest transportation hub of the single most influential city in the world for a night and set up 32 open bars. Georgetown does. We rolled up to Union Station and were greeted by the most massive line of people dressed like they were going into a state dinner. Hair and makeup done, fully tailored suits, “sir”s and “doctor”s and “captian”s everywhere. I was surrounded by the Hollywood image of academia, but somehow this was more polished and picturesque than the movies could have ever conveyed and this was actually real. Once we convinced the doorman to let us jump half the line we entered a sea of people filling the entire Union Station hall and several of the adjoining restaurants. Some were dancing to the live band playing Beatles covers, some were picking from tables of beautifully presented hors d’hoeuvres, and at least two were trying to tick off a drink at every single open bar. We spent the night hanging out with Mike’s friends and ordering drinks by the armload, dancing to the DJ downstairs, and watching a 50 year old woman, presumably the mother of some terribly embarrassed student, sling her sultry leg over the railing of an escalator as she exited the dance floor.
Saturday and Sunday were family time and watching Mike graduate with a fist bump to the President of Georgetown, and Monday I slung a backpack o’er my shoulder again. I hit the Philadelphia suburbs, then up to Albany to see my grandmother, NYC, Philadelphia proper, and back out to the suburbs in under a week.
The East Coast has buses that run between Chinatown in all the major cities, and they are incredibly cheap. I was told my cousin doesn’t like them because, although they’re really cheap, no one speaks English and you can’t be completely sure you’re going to get where you want to go. After a couple months in South America that seemed normal.
I watched my friend’s daughter dominate on the BMX track, visited with some more family, did some east coast mountain biking (there are alternate trails TO fallen logs, not around them), and then spent a week in DC with my brother and sister to round out my time on the East Coast. Finally I climbed into a spraypainted hippie “artcar” and took a Craigslist rideshare to Boulder.