A Most Interesting Ride on the Metro

We had a busy day today.  We spent a good part of it trekking up to Baltimore to visit the National Aquarium, which was well worth the effort.  We saw a lot of interesting marine and aquatic life, and the facility is well designed, taking about 3 hours to get through.

But that wasn't the most interesting activity of the day.  We had promised grandson Andrew a trip on the Metro.  At 5 years old he is very interested in trains, planes, construction equipment and most other large and noisy things.  But we had opted for activities that didn't need a Metro trip, and this was our last evening before heading to Savannah for the 4th of July.

So after dinner we packed up in the car and drove to a county parking garage near the Silver Spring Metro Station.  We walked to the station, and as soon as it came into sight a train was spotted.

"There's one!"  "Can we take that train?"

There are several impressive things about the Metro, for anyone who hasn't just become used to them.  One is just the fun of boarding a train and then whisking off - the electric trains accelerate briskly.  Another is the tunnels and underground stations.  And some of those stations are deep underground, so they have extremely long escalators that take passengers up to the surface.

We were able to give Andrew the full experience, riding two stops north from Silver Spring out to Wheaton, which has one of the very long escalators.  We rode it up, exited the station, and went outside to look around for a few minutes before reversing our course for the ride back to Silver Spring.

I was reminded of how amazing the experience can be, and how much is missed by treating it as routine, or creating 'negatives' out of the experience, such as unhappiness about having to wait several minutes for a train, or how long it takes to get up the escalator to the top of the station, or being bothered by the stream of other passengers all hurrying to the escalator or the turnstiles.  It is nice to just leave that little internal complainer turned off and enjoy what is.