Dec 4, 2015 3 min read

I made a mistake. I went down to Washington, D.C., over the Thanksgiving holiday. Mostly, I spent the weekend in Alexandria, where I went to several fine restaurants and some terrific museums.

I went to the Apothecary Museum. Yes. You read that right. It’s a museum dedicated to a drug store that had been around since the beginning of the United States. There’s a note from Martha Washington in there, asking for a bottle of castor oil. There also are all sorts of fun little rusty tools that assist a person in bleeding. Back in the day, they thought that you’d be a lot healthier if you had less blood in your body. It was a wonderful time to be a leech.

Going to the Apothecary Museum was not the mistake. I found it rather enjoyable. I drove down to D.C. on Black Friday. While everyone else was either sleeping or spending all of their money at the mall, I was on my way to a wild weekend of restaurants and museums. OK, maybe it wasn’t wild, but it was a lot of fun.

The tricky business was that I left Washington, D.C., on the Sunday of Thanksgiving weekend. I chose to drive on the busiest travel day of the year. That was my faux pas. Between Black Friday and Cyber Monday there is … Standstill Sunday!

It was smooth sailing until I got to Breezewood (I have always wanted to rename that town Pitstop, Pennsylvania). If you’ve never been, Breezewood is like a science experiment: You add gas and relieve yourself of liquid.

The gas stations in Breezewood were all crowded. I decided I could wait to Midway, a rest stop on the turnpike several miles away. The mile to the toll road was a parking lot. I looked down and noticed that I had a fourth of a tank of gas. I knew I made a critical error.

I thought, “Once I get through the toll booth, it’ll be smooth sailing again.” It was not. I panicked. I didn’t think I had enough gas to get there. I threw the car into neutral and went hypermiling. Basically, I tried to coast my way to Midway. Luckily, it was mostly downhill.

I made it to Midway on fumes. Meanwhile, inside I was a water balloon that had been filled up too much. I was ready to burst. There was a long line to the men’s room, but it moved pretty quickly. Luckily, I wasn’t a woman. The line to the ladies’ room was like Space Mountain. There were at least 400 women waiting to divest their bladders.

Afterward, I went to buy an iced tea – so that I could experience the same pain by the time I got to Monroeville. I stood in line for 20 minutes. The line for soda and junk food snaked around the store. It was the most inconvenient convenience store of all time.

The trip that took me three and a half hours to D.C. took five and a half on the way home.

I was recounting the story to my friend Lonnie on the phone, describing the horrors of the return trip. She laughed and said, “This is going to be a column, isn’t it?” I nodded, but since it was a phone conversation, I had to say something out loud.

So I said, “Yep.” And now, you’re reading it.