It’s like this see…

… The forecast made it sound like a rainy day today. With Sarah not having any meetings and me being, well, retired, we took advantage of where we live and metroed in to the American History Museum. It had been almost a full Robert lifetime since we’d been :)

As we headed back to the metro we stopped for a bite and bit of tea from Teaism and we got a call from Robert. He has the chance for extra credit if he can produce an illustrated map of where sewage flows.

He gets normal credit for an illustrated map of the flow from his dorm in Seattle to Seattle’s waste water treatment facility at Discovery Point.

But he was wondering if his parents could take a few photos for him to work on an Alexandria map. Like Hooff’s Run where storm water flows through Alexandria.

The forecast was wrong, it was not rainy and we were on our way back home anyway so …

… we learned that the waste water plant we thought treated our water actually doesn’t. That is for Arlington and Alexandria has it’s own treatment plant, which is getting substantially upgraded (thanks our and our neighbors waste water bills).

And we found this cool public art noting how Alexandria was exepcted to be (and was, for a while) a major shipping port (in the cities early days). With lots of traffic to Hispaniola, Barbados, Jamaica and Bermuda (I may have to go back and re-read that to be sure I’ve remembered that correctly).

We never would have stumbled upon that globe with it’s bit of history if we’d not been on the little expedition for Robert this afternoon.