The Washington D.C. metro is probably the best of its kind in the U.S., which, now that I think about it, isn’t saying all that much because public transportation systems here kind of blow. But even compared with Europe, DC’s metro is pretty good. Everything is clearly marked and the spaghetti tangle of subway lines (similar to those in Paris) actually facilitates getting most places in the city.

Figuring out how to pay for it is another matter entirely. Every departure and destination combination has its own price, and each of those prices change depending on whether you’re traveling at a “regular” hour, a “discounted” hour or a “peak of the peak” hour. If you have a “Smart Trip” card, you pay 25 cents less than the normal price. If you don’t have a card, your leg gets humped by Hoyas, or something. A tourist could skip all of that nonsense and just get a day pass, except for the small fact that day passes aren’t actually valid for an entire day. Ha-ha, stupid tourists.

We’re not complete morons and we’ve (mostly) mastered basic arithmetic. So with a little planning and finger counting we calculated how much to put on our Smart Trip cards. One unplanned trip at a “peak of peak” time, though, had us fifteen cents short on our final stop. No worries. We’ll just add the fifteen cents at a vending machine and we’ll be square. Only this particular machine wouldn’t accept credit cards or change, dollars only! Stupid tourists.