A Room of One's Own

Coming out of NYC was as always frustrating. I made incredibly good time while I was rolling, but was hampered by three major impediments.
1) The A Train stopped at a stop is wasn't supposed to stop at for 15 minutes, no explanation given. Then, it was moved down the track into the tunnel and waited there for another 15 equally inexplicable minutes. Some of the passengers theorized that our driver may have been, "smoking up in there."
2) There was some random traffic near the Brooklyn Bridge on 278 because there was some overflowing drain which held me up for about 15-30 min.
3) It was raining cats and dogs the whole way.
Anyways, our friends Ryan and Rebecca were kind enough to meet Janna at Union station in DC when she arrived, so when I came to there house a half an hour later, we packed up and headed for our hotel, where we planned to meet R&R for dinner. Well, check-in time was 3:00, so we wandered out to a bookstore, where we made several random purchases, the most entertaining being travel Boggle, which when we got to our hotel and after appropriate cleansing and reunion activities, we played for the balance of the afternoon.
R&R came to meet us at about 7:30 for dinner, which we enjoyed at an Italian restaurant, owned and operated by Columbians. It seems to be quite common for Hispanics to stand in for the more central Mediterranean types in culinary establishments.
After dinner we proceeded through the driving rain to a party hosted by one of Ryan's co-workers. The punch contained rasberry vodka, so it kind of snuck up on me, but we headed home at about midnight via the Metro, and soon we were fast asleep.