Outer World

Welcome to my blog and my first post! So happy and grateful to have you here but I won’t get all sappy now, let’s hop straight into this post shall we? So this past weekend we traveled to the far away land of Washington D.C. to enjoy “Bloomaroo” at The Wharf. For those of you who may not know what Bloomaroo is, it’s a festival to celebrate the bloom of the cherry blossom trees surrounding the area. Just know that I was looking forward to this for weeks before-hand and was literally fantasizing of the great time we would have. The arrival of warm weather, dancing by the water to live music, great food options and some light-hearted shenanigans filled my heart. But little did we know the obstacles that awaited us. If someone would’ve warned me I definitely would’ve made better decisions that FOR SURE would’ve upgraded our experience. So here are my tips on how to enjoy (or survive) Bloomaroo! 1. If you want to drive…DON’T You guys don’t know me well yet but just know Lil’ Tuesdaé likes to have her own wheels, (an anxiety thing, I’ll fill you in later) but when I say driving will kill your day I am not exaggerating. We spent what would normally be a hour and a half drive from Baltimore County to D.C. 3 HOURS and some change in traffic. Left around 12:30 (which I thought was early for an event that begins at 4 p.m.) and arrived and finally parked at 3.45 or such. Just getting out of Baltimore took up about 2 hours of that but it looked like smooth sailing when we finally got into The Wharf. I admit maybe I should have prepared and anticipated the commute time much better. I recommend not just relying on Google Maps since it always changes and isn’t totally accurate to predict your time of arrival. If I can stress anything, if you have the financial ability just come down the night before and stay at a hotel or if not, leave before noon for sure. We will be for certain doing that next year! 2. There is NO PARKING!, kinda Now to the festival website’s credit it does tell you upfront that parking is extremely scarce so public transportation and ride share (uber, lyft, etc) are recommended. However, that doesn’t really become an option for those who live out of town is it? My philosophy, or delusion, was that we’d leave early enough to beat the flood of festival goers (LOL) to catch some street parking or the hotel parking straight along the wharf. There are 3 garages I believe with about a little under 1000 spaces collectively. Mind you around 1.5 million people show up every year for this festival, we’ll talk more about that in a minute. So obviously by time little ole me shows up these places are full. What I very much didn’t appreciate was when you drive to one garage entrance and you see it’s full, the attendant tells you to drive a little ways to the next garage because they have spaces. But when you go and fight through traffic, double parked cars and jay-walkers to arrive at said garage they give the same spiel. We did maybe an half hour of this before giving up, pulling our hair out and wasting gas going in circles to just choose the nearby L’Enfant Plaza parking for around $35. There are a crap ton of stairs btw. I highly suggest forgetting about hotel parking and go straight to the L’Enfant Plaza since the prices were the same anyway just a tad bit of a walk. 3. May as well pack a damn lunch I’m pretty sure you’re not supposed to but let me tell you, make those restaurant reservations well in advance (3 days prior at the least). Now us being women and never knowing what to eat is accurate 1000% but flubbed us royally when we got hungry. I think I was so stressed from driving that my appetite wouldn’t grow but we went to call around and see where we wanted to try out anyway. We actually started calling around right before we parked and all we got were “I’m sorry we currently aren’t taking anymore reservations” responses. Okay no big deal right? We’ll just walk in because for sure not everyone who makes a reservations keeps it or it’s no way they can turn away my adorable face right? “I’m so sorry but we just stopped taking walk-ins”. So now we’re wandering about in a sea of like fiftyhunnidleven people going from door to door seeking refuge. We see a spot where people are going in and aren’t looking frustrated or being turned away so we try there. I wish I got his name but there was a real cool man at the door of Whitlows who told us we can put our names down but it’s gonna be like an hour/hour and a half wait. We said “hey, it’s better than nothing.” So with our number and names down, we tried to explore a bit more of the festival. Yet I did wonder why they even took our names at all since the place was swamped but you’ll see. So we’re vibing, drinking our little pink drinks and watching the live music at one of the stages next to the “bloomed out” mini coopers (I have a thang for mini coopers btw,*sighs ) when my phone rings and it’s the host saying our table is ready. Mind you we have only been at the stages for maybe 25 minutes and just got our drinks that you inconveniently cannot take outside of that area. She only had a white wine and I a “pink vodka something overpriced” and chugged it afraid they would give our seats away if we took too long. The vodka wasn’t even the issue, it was the brain freeze from the ice but anyway…we arrive and