Sidewalk Bob Terwilliger

Having now dealt with the Grand Floral Walk, there was one other walk that I had planned on taking, and did, and that is the walk along Terwilliger up to the Lilac Garden. (Actually, I did recently get to go along the Eastbank Esplanade, but I still haven’t done the full river loop.)

The desire to walk Terwilliger came from many trips along it relating to Mom’s two knee surgeries. There were visits with the doctor beforehand, and follow-up visits, and actually taking her to and picking her up from the hospital, and to some extent visiting her, though often in that case I ended up going via the tram.

Regardless, there is a sidewalk and park and woods all along Terwilliger, and I can’t see a path without wanting to walk it. Usually we were coming from Capitol Highway and turning in at the Casey Eye Institute, so I was mainly seeing that half, but also at least a few times I did get to see the other side, and one thing I noticed is that when you get down towards the end of Sam Jackson, there is Duniway Park with a lilac garden. The thought occurred to me that it would be really nice to walk it when the lilacs were in bloom, because I love lilacs.

Well, timing didn’t work out for that, and it wasn’t even an option this year, because the lilac season seemed to fade away really quickly. Regardless, I did take an afternoon where I had some time, get off the bus at Capitol Highway and Terwilliger, and take the walk.

The first thing I have to say is that things go by a lot more slowly on foot than in car, and it is longer than it looks. That’s not all bad—I wanted a long walk—but I probably could have planned the timing better. As near as I can tell, the initial route that I planned is about 2.2 miles. It ended up being more than that for a couple of reasons, which we will get into.

I do like the path a lot. It is not convenient at all, based on where I live and work, but if I was in that area I would use it all the time. If I was located in DC, I would go around the Tidal Basin all the time, because I really love it there.

Once you’re going by slowly, there is more to it than meets the eye. There are all of these side trails and offshoots. Some of them are part of an old health trail, with workout stations where you would stop and do pushups or rings or something. This has not been maintained, so some of the signs and pieces are missing, but it is kind of a fun idea. There are other side paths that are not related to this, and remember, I have this impulse where I am automatically drawn to all of them, but it just was not practical. I was walking on the right, heading towards Sam Jackson, so I went down most of the side paths on that side, but I would see things on the left that I was really curious about, but crossing back and forth would have kept me out there forever.

Sticking with one side of the road seemed like a good system, but even so, there was another snag with my instinct to explore. This one path I believe started with the health trail, because there was something that looked like a station for it there, but the trail just kept going past it. I kept thinking, well, it’s only a little bit farther down, but it kept going and going, till it looked like it might head all the way down to Barbur. The area is heavily wooded and I am a lone woman with a not particularly good cell phone. Part of me wanted to keep going, but my brain was saying, Gina, you are going to stumble onto a camp of crazy vagrants, or the dumping ground of a serial killer, or both. Get back up that hill! So, I still have some unanswered curiosity there. However, I am also still alive, so I’ve got that going for me, which is nice.

There are some things that made me feel like I might want a do-over or three. First of all, there is the left side, which might again involve making some choices where you can’t get everything in on one trip, but also there is that one path, which I’m sure it would be fine to do as long as I had a buddy, or maybe just a knife. I can throw down if I need to. Also, as you got to the park, the main path wound around, which is what I chose, but there was also a shortcut which went straight downhill, and I kind of would have liked to take that also. Oh, and maybe, you know, actually be in the lilac garden when there are lilacs blooming.

The other reason things went longer is that there just wasn’t a convenient bus stop when I was done, so I started walking into down, and ended up going to the first stop on the green line before I really found anything that fit my needs. Anyway, there was something I wanted to do, and I did it. Cue the sense of accomplishment.