Hi, this is Chris Hubs.

I don’t know why you’re listening to this, but since you are, let’s talk about some random travel thoughts, I guess.

I’m in DC this week for work, and the way the meetings and my work schedule have gone, I end up with more of my time to do activities after my meetings in the evening, and then the mornings tend to be a rushed start.

So finding time to sneak my recordings in ahead of time is interesting, but starting to get it figured out.

Yesterday after work, I was definitely ready to stretch my legs.

I had brought my running shoes along on the trip, and so I’m like, let’s go for a run.

I’m staying on the west end of DC, not quite into Georgetown, but close.

And so I plotted a route up around some places I had never been before.

I took whatever this avenue is, I’m looking at the map as I record and I forget what it is, took Massachusetts Avenue northwest up past the Naval Observatory, and then looped around the National Cathedral before heading back south down Wisconsin Avenue through Georgetown and back to my hotel.

It was a nice run.

It was almost six miles, and it was basically uphill the entire way, but that meant it was downhill the entire way back.

And if you’re going to do a run, I’d rather do it that way than the opposite.

One thing I didn’t expect when I just charted the run on a map and planned out to do it was that Massachusetts Avenue northwest, there is what appears to be known as Embassy Row, and I just found it fascinating to run down the street and every next building I went past it felt like was embassy of this country or that country.

Looking at the map this morning, I’m like, well, it’s the embassy from Greece and from Kenya and Haiti and the Ivory Coast and Belize and Italy and a great big one from Brazil.

That was a cool building.

And then you get to the British Embassy, which is right next to the Naval Observatory, and it takes up like an entire block and multiple buildings.

Clearly a long established relationship and lots of stuff going on there.

It was fascinating.

I remember running past some of the small African countries’ embassies and thinking, here’s just this little building, not that big, but devoted to this country’s desire to establish and maintain a relationship with the United States.

And that’s just kind of wild to me.

Just on the whole, the idea that we have all these little places that are essentially excerpts of other countries settled into place here near our nation’s capital because we want to have this international interchange.

And I think that’s kind of delightful, even for all the dynamics of international politics and the give and take that may go on and the strategic ways that those embassies are used.

Just the idea that there’s this importance of foreign interchange and that there are people living as representatives of all these countries, all lined up and down the street as I’m running by is just kind of wild to me, but a neat thing.

I’d never been to the Washington Cathedral before.

I technically still haven’t been to it.

I only really jogged the roads around the outside of it.

What a beautiful building.

I would love to go visit it and see it properly sometime.

After passing all the really sort of small embassies on the way up, coming back around, a couple of really large ones on Wisconsin Avenue on the way back.

One that I didn’t see the sign for on the exterior, and it took me a second, but after all these small ones that are just sort of residences on the street, almost in row buildings, you come back around and set way back from the street and with a lot of space around it and its fence, it’s this ginormous sort of white cubical concrete building.

Finally I got smart and recognized the flag and went, Oh yes, the Russian Embassy.

And then a little further down, I guess I see the map tells me that the French Embassy is right there as well, but I was a little far away to actually see that as I came back into Georgetown.

So it was a really nice afternoon for a run and fun to see and think about a bunch of places further away and all of their little outposts here within our nation’s capital.

We’ll talk later.