Morning Beltway Moment

Got an early start to the day helping a friend. Heading back home and I discovered something quite wonderful. Driving on the Beltway @ 5:15 AM is a helluva lot more fun than doing it between 4:00 and 5:30 PM! 

It's sorta like this: You're tooling along on a road with 4 to 5 lanes of pavement in either direction in the company of perhaps 1.5 lanes worth of fellow travelers. The rising sun, still far from visible, casts a pinkish hue on the edges of the indigo blue sky, but still the morning star and a the thinnest sliver of the waning moon are visible like some flipped version of the Pakistani Flag. And you can drive at 75 without feeling the least bit out of place. Something you're doing without even realizing it until you feel the centrifugal force as your pick-up dips into and rounds out of the big curve at the Mormon Temple. But now that you know, you are not dissuaded. You maintain your pace all the way to the top of the hill at Georgia Avenue, an impossible feat during rush hour. Over top you float into the languorous S-turn around Holy Cross Hospital with its rising new addition. Enough of the sky is still a deep blue to give the top two floors under-construction and festooned all around and within with large amber-glowing incandescent light bulbs the look of a cruise ship crossing a calm sea. Then it's decision time. Do you exit University Boulevard or continue on to New Hampshire Avenue? You choose, University Boulevard. It's bound to be more interesting @ 5:25 in the morning than NH Ave. So you ease off the gas just enough to let the semi to your right clear your pick-up's front end, and then glide across 4 lanes like a speed skater coming out of the final turn and with a whoosh leave the beltway in your rearview mirror.