The trailhead is literally two blocks from the busyness of Georgetown’s main drag. We were calling on our Manhattan crowd-navigation skills just to get across the street sometimes during rush hour. But standing here by the water (again, two blocks away) there was just the peace and quiet of the Potomac.

Along the trail there’s a couple of canoe rental places. This one is within sight of the Watergate complex, the Kennedy Center and the Washington Monument.

But once you hit the end of Water Street, the canal and a steep hillside separate you from the inner suburbs.

There are actually two paths: there’s the trail, a paved route about 10 feet wide; and up above the old canal towpath. The towpath is much wider and, because it’s not paved, is both easier on the feet and tends to keep the cyclists away. Nothing against cyclists, but it was nice to not have to watch out for them.

Bits and pieces of history are hidden away in the thicket between the trail and the water. Here, what looks to be an old kiln or smelting furnace. No explanation was available that we could find. You really need to click on this image to enlarge it, for it to be legible.

But besides the Dr. Seuss-like quality of this, there are remnants of some large earthworks built by the railroad and, before that, the canal company. We spent a good amount of time trying to figure out how the inclined plan at mile 9.2 — of which all that’s immediately visible is a few boulders and iron bolts — fit into the topography, and whether or not the foundations of some buildings below, and some rail ties near the riverbank, were part of it or some other project.

We only had time — it gets dark early these days — to do about two miles out-and-back. Toward the end we explored some other remnants of transportation past, such as the now-unused canal that went from the Ohio river all the way into downtown DC.

And the fossil remains of a beautiful stone bridge grown obsolescent.

We didn’t get nearly far enough to see any of the locks — that would have been another two miles or so. We’ll be back in the spring or summer, taking advantage of one of the numerous bike-rental places nearby so that we can take in the entire length.

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But on the inside, it was a soaring space of wood and steel, highlighted by a cathedral-like cupola.

The displays take you from the earliest incarnation of a Baltimore and Ohio line train — horse drawn as it turns out — through the largest steam engines ever made. Some of them, you can go inside and twiddle with the dials.

Some you just get to see their exquisitely oil-stained exteriors.

The repair building houses some fine examples of the glory years of rail design.

Unfortunately, the space wasn’t meant for display so there’s no good place to stand to get the big picture.

Here’s the 1604, the biggest steam engine every produced. It weighs somewhere in the range of three quarters of a million pounds, according to our tour guide.

The finer details are on display as well, like this elegant light fixture from the early 20th century.

Or just the logos and typography.

As well as a few questionable (but fun) color choices.

E. and I considered the admission fee ($14) to be a bit steep for what it was, but still we’re glad we went. There are also exhibits outside you can wander around in (not much) for free, as well as — of course — a gift shop.

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Washington Monument

As if you don’t know where it is:

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Tomorrow the moon will be out of position, but Jupiter and Venus will be even closer, setting about a minute apart.

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Looking out over the ramparts, it was cause for a lot of lame jokes about things like the twilight’s last gleaming.

And so on.

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Working with a moving target of a schedule, it took a little thought to come up with a manageable solution. Over the summer I wrestled with trying to find some kind of calendar application, and also considering writing my own. The idea would have been to made it editable in a Web interface by a non-technical person, since the underlying code for a grid (multiple time slots in ten or so different rooms) would be too complex and fragile.

But for something that’s a one-time use as this is, I settled on hard-coding the shell of a table and having each room in the schedule be one cell that spanned all the rows in the column. Then within each column each event is a separate div carrying a class name — two, three, four, etc. — denoting how many fifteen-minute time slots it covered. A half-hour session, for example, would be class “two.”
<tr>
<th class="time">4:00</th>
<td rowspan="12">
<!-- events go here for Library -->
<div class="two dark"></div>
<div class="two">Puppets</div>
<div class="two dark"></div>
<div class="two">Puppets</div>
</td>
<td rowspan="12">
<!-- events go here for Gym I -->
<div class="dark one"></div>
<div class="two">Circus Workshop</div>
<div class="dark two"></div>
<div class="two">Circus Workshop</div>
</td>


After the tds that carry the events, there is a sequence of new rows with ths that carry the times. The style sheet then fixes the height of the div.

table.schedule td div { height: 50px }
table.schedule td div.two { height: 100px }
table.schedule td div.three { height: 150px }
table.schedule td div.four { height: 200px }
table.schedule td div.five { height: 250px }
table.schedule td div.six { height: 300px }
table.schedule td div.seven { height: 350px }
table.schedule td div.eight { height: 400px }

Elsewhere, each row — which carries the legend of time slots in the left column — is hard-coded to 50px high.

There’s a separate class called “dark,” which has the same background color as the page itself so that breaks and other times when the room is empty can be spacers. Grouping the style you can have div class=”dark four” as one hour of idle time in a room.

Anyway, I thought it was a fairly simple way to stack these jogged sessions without resorting to an hideously recursive grouping of rowspan and colspan tags. Google Calendar goes even farther, where everything is a div with dynamically created heights and widths. But they’ve got somewhat more resources than I do for programming.

By the way, I hate the design so far (the jokes on me, it doesn’t have a design). The image in the background is from the Hubble Space Telescope, the only cool thing here.

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Download audio file (Villa-Lobos_Bachianas-Brasileiras-2_toccata.mp3)

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