How Do I Get (My 10 Friends and I) There From Here?: Adams Morgan

Imagine you're at your apartment in Silver Spring, you've had a few bevs, and you need to get your 10 friends to Adams Morgan to meet more friends for some Halloween celebration.  You're in a state of de facto carlessness (you've had a few bevs) and your friends are getting anxious.  That was the situation I found myself in on Saturday, around... well I won't disclose the time.

We could have taken the Metro there... I guess.  But my friends had probably already had their fill of Metro for the day, having piled on once already to get to the Rally to Restore Sanity.  The problem with taking the Metro to Adams Morgan from my apartment is that it just. takes. so. long.  It's a ten minute walk to the station, then it's about a half hour ride on the Red Line from Silver Spring to the Woodley Park-Zoo/Adams Morgan station, then it's another fifteen minute walk down Calvert Street to the bars.

Calling it "Woodley Park-Zoo/Adams Morgan" has always felt way too deceiving to me.  Sure, it's the "Adams Morgan" stop by virtue of the fact that there is not a closer station to that part of the city, but to get to what you're looking for you've got a .8 mile walk from when you get off the train across the bridge.  Dissimilarly, Foggy Bottom is not called "Foggy Bottom/GWU/Georgetown" even though there is no closer metro stop to Georgetown.  Consider these two maps:

The first map is from the Woodley Park-Zoo/Adams Morgan metro on Connecticut Avenue near Woodley Road to TomTom, a favorite spot of ours since I lived with some friends in Kalorama during the summer of 2007, at 2333 18th St NW.  It's a .8 mile walk, according to Google Maps.  The second map is from the Foggy Bottom/GWU metro a block from Washington Circle Park to the intersection of M Street and Wisconsin Avenue in Georgetown, one of the busiest there.  That's a .9 mile walk, according to Google Maps.  It goes to show how names of stations can be used as advertising mechanisms, depending on whether the destination wants to broadcast its proximity, in the case of AdMo, or keep it on the down low, in the case of Georgetown.

Given that I wasn't sure if my friends were up for another trek into the city via metro after the one we had had earlier in the day, we ended up taking Sun Cab, and using my "personal van cab driver" Sully.  At this point, Sully is more popular with me than any of my friends because he's been extremely late once or twice, but I still like to use him because all it takes is a text message to get in touch with him as opposed to calling tons of companies.  Plus, van cabs are hard to come by and I like to keep everyone together, and if he's really late he'll give us the ride for free.  We did indeed stuff all ten of my friends into the cab, with me riding shotgun and shooting the shit with Sully of course (no one likes to be the shotgun sitter in a cab) and we were able to stay together for that reason until other circumstances saw us separated not long after arrival.  For instance, did you know just as Adams Morgan lacks convenient Metro service, it also lacks AT&T service?  Well, at least it does on Halloween night.