Today I went for a back ride around Arlington.

I used four dedicated bicycle trails, so I hardly encountered any car traffic. I started by going to the Roosevelt Island entrance, and from there to Reagan National Airport. The second part of my trip brought me to Shirlington, where I had lunch at a sandwich place next to Carlyle's.

From Shirlington I continued the Four Mile Run trail (which is actually 6,5 miles). To get back home I used the Curtis trail. Initially I missed the exit to the east-bound Curtis trail, and it took me some 15 minutes to realize I was traveling west, not east.

When I got home I found this route on-line and it is named the Arlington Triangle. The link nicely shows the various trails I took. They call it a "nice, short route of only 17 miles", but I was rather proud of completing it. Of course I brought my camera so I have some pictures of my trip online.

Although the last few days it was colder again, spring is definitely in the air. Especially last weekend was very warm -- I went for a walk in my shorts & T-shirt, pretty amazing for early March.

Now it's colder again, but the trees and flowers are showing signs of an early spring.

This weekend I'm working on a presentation which takes quite some time. This afternoon I went to the library, for the first time on my bike. It's so quick, took only 15 minutes to get there -- it's faster than by metro.

The parking meters in Arlington have a nice slogan:


All may park, all must pay.

Sunday I went for a nice bike trip to downtown D.C. About a month ago Sasha and I bought two bicycles, and although we've made smaller trips before today was the first time I went on a long tour.

It wasn't as sunny as the day before but the weather was very nice and around 1.00 pm I left for Georgetown. I made a short stop at Revolution Cycles. We bought our bikes from the same shop at their Arlington branch. I bought a small pump, lights and most importantly a bike map of the area. Bicycling here is quite different than in the Netherlands, where you can travel by bike pretty much everywhere. In D.C. many streets are not really meant for bicycles though, and drivers are not really used to see bicycles on the street.

I spent a couple of hours touring around, from Georgetown through the C & O Canal trail to the Tidal Bassin and then to downtown Washington. In the city I came across the St. Patrick's Parade.

I brought my camera on the trip and took some pictures.

Last night we saw Lord of War, a movie about international arms trade.

The movie was made as if it were a documentary about Yuri Orlov, a trader in arms or "gun runner" played by Nicolas Cage. Orlov grows up in Little Odessa and slowly becomes the world most successful arms trader. His big boost comes when the Iron Curtain falls and he starts trading huge amounts of weapons between his native Ukraine and other countries to West-Africa.

The movie had an interesting, if at times cynical plot as it deals with the conflict that Orlov faces between his drive for success and the immorality of his work.

Some of the scenes were cruel to see, which was part of the movie's message of course, but over-all it treated the subject with a mixture of moral analysis, reporting-style objectivity and humor.

It's early March and the weather is just amazing today. It's in the 70s -- more than 22 degrees Celcius.

We went to Ballston where there was the Shamrock festival but when we arrived around 3.30 pm the line for entrance was about two hours and we decided not to wait that long. Instead we went for a nice walk and got some of the special top Grolsch bottles that we drank on our balcony in the sun.

St Patrick's Day is only next week, anyway.

So, when I called United on Wednesday evening, they told me that my bag was lost and that they would send me the reimbursement forms soon.

We left San Juan Thursday afternoon, and I was wearing all my belongings in my laptop bag and two plastic bags from the hotel. At least I had no luggage to check in this time. When I asked at the counter if there was any news the representative said they had found the bag, and that it was in D.C., waiting for me.

When I arrived at Dulles it turned out that my bag was actually just arriving from Charlottesville, another airport, and had made quite a trip in the last few days. Apparently there had been a problem with the tag attached to my bag, and it had two instead of one barcode. It arrived practically at the same time as our flight, so all I had to do was to go to another carousel to see my bag arriving, safe and well.

Two weeks ago we went to the National Archives.

This picture shows the ice skating ring just in front of it. The brightly shining sun made for a relatively warm day.

We saw the Constitution and Declaration of Independence again and spent a nice time in the museum (National Vaults).