After a bit of sleep best described as blissful oblivion after the previous day’s travels and adventures, it was time to get off my duff and get moving to catch the train into the heart of Washington DC.
First thing was to actually find the Weihle-Reston East station which is the current terminus of the Metro’s Silver Line. The plans are for Metro to finally make it all the way to Dulles and a couple of stations beyond it but sadly I’m here a few months too early to take advantage of a hotel shuttle to Dulles and have to find the current end of the Silver Line the hard way via surface streets.
That turned out to be far harder than it looked when mapping the route on the satnav!
In fairness, it would have been easy had I given up being cheap in exchange for a quicker trip to the rail station as Weihle-Reston East station is tucked right in the middle of the tolled motorway and there’s an exit right near where the station is located.
No, I had what I felt was a good sense of direction and a functional satnav and I was convinced I was going to use both of those tools to navigate my way there.
What the satnav doesn’t prepare you for is the construction projects between the hotel and the station on the surface streets that required an almost immediate detour and even knowing that I needed to head generally east toward downtown Reston, the road works seemed to conspire against that actually happening.
A hour later, I finally made it to the Metro car park near the station.
This is the point where I’ll confess to having a bit of a panic attack wondering if my long suffering unlimited Metro pass that I had purchased over a year prior would actually work this time.
Ah, yes…that poor doomed three-day unlimited pass I had purchased in Pittsburgh the night before arriving in DC only to discover how hopelessly broken Metro’s IT system can be. Had I not transferred my physical card into the SmarTrip app on the phone, I’d have been able to happily use that physical card rather than have so much frustration over my phone being able see the pass but not activate the turnstiles that I actually ended up purchasing a single-day unlimited pass to complete the day’s wandering in peace.
You’d have thought that would have been the end of the saga but, no…you’ve apparently not been paying attention to my rather dodgy luck I’ve perfected over the past 50 years! 🙂
More Metro IT-related fun began after I returned home to Raleigh and tried to get a refund of the pass as I had no idea when I’d be back in DC to visit Dad. I ring up Metro with the idea that as I live outside the 100-mile radius from DC, according to their policy this should be straightforward. And indeed it seemed to be so as the lady I was speaking to was very understanding of the situation and promised to process the refund of the pass and that I should see it in 3-6 weeks.
OK. So imagine my surprise when I didn’t actually see that refund ever come through. Every now and then I’d log into the SmarTrip app and there that phantom pass would be visible with an expiry date that I would expect it would vanish from existence without ever paying up the refund. So I’d check after the expiry date only to be surprised by seeing the pass was still there with a new expiry date a couple of months down the road.
For a year that pass kept expiring and renewing and of course it was due to expire about three days before I would arrive on this current trip to DC. That’s my luck, apparently.
So I figured I’d try to handle this intelligently and ring up Metro several days before traveling this time to see what they thought about the Zombie Pass(tm) that was due to expire but then rise from the dead if the previous pattern was to be believed.
I was advised to load some cash onto the SmarTrip card which would be used to pay for the parking at the station.
I had remembered that one of the agents I’d talked to last year whilst waiting for a train to arrive at Springfield-Franconia station had suggested loading cash onto the SmarTrip so that the pass would activate which seemed more than a little bit daft at the time.
But apparently the big glitch in the Metro IT system when it comes to passes on the SmarTrip card is that the system watching the fare gates won’t activate a pending pass if there is no cash value on the card because it can take anywhere from 4-72 hours for the fare gates to catch up to the fact that an unlimited pass is now in play and should be used in lieu of charging the actual cash value for the trip. Unlike the New York subway, the fare varies depending on where you begin and end your trip and any transfers to bus and back again in between.
But if there is some cash to be had on the card when you tape the reader to ensure Metro gets paid one way or another for your trip, the fare-gates will allow you through to start your trip and simultaneously activate the pending pass. I was advised that it could take hours for the fare-gates to catch up to the fact that I’d “clocked in” at Weihle-Reston East but I figured I was likely to be wandering round the Mall whilst waiting to visit the Holocaust Museum so even the lower-end estimate of four hours for the pass to activate wouldn’t be a problem.
With that context, you can imagine my trepidation as I approached the fare-gate with my phone in hand and waved it toward the contact-less reader.
To my immense relief, it worked and the gate opened and almost immediately I got an alert on the phone that Metro had noticed that I’d entered their system at Weihle-Reston East station.
Even better was the fact that a train was waiting in the station to take me all the way to Smithsonian station on the Mall.
By the time I had “clocked out” of the Metro system at Smithsonian about a hour later, I checked the app and sure enough, the pass had already activated and no cash was taken for the ride from Reston.
WOO HOO!
So the points to remember is to make sure there is cash available to cover parking and any rides on Metro until the pending pass can activate and be visible to the fare-gates and to purchase the pass about a week ahead of traveling to ensure it’ll be correctly picked up by the fare-gates upon first entry. Got it! 🙂
I had some time to kill on the Mall whilst waiting for my museum ticket time to arrive so I took advantage of the sunny and slightly breezy but very pleasant temperature to relax and check out the scenery and make some notes on things that I wanted to do on this trip to DC.
I definitely wanted to do the various Smithsonian art museums such as Freer and Hirshhorn that I’d missed on previous trips and then who knows where I might end up and what I’d do.
From my vantage point, you could see the west facing side of the Capitol building still shrouded by the scaffolding and white tarps where they were still repairing damage to the building caused by the insurrection on 06 Jan 2021. Seeing that and knowing the events that caused it was not *THAT* long ago was surreal, to put it mildly.
But now it’s time to head down the street a bit to a museum I had simultaneously dreaded visiting but also was in the right frame of mind to truly appreciate it after seeing our country’s government and Constitution suffer through and weather a brutal attack…the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.
