I’ve been lucky to borrow my friend’s maroon Hyundai for the last several days as I was helping her and her boyfriend move into a nice flat in Capitol Hill. And you know what, I loved it. I don’t own a car (and neither does my sister, whom I live with now). So my transportation methods are limited to the Friendship Heights metro 15 minutes away, or the L1/L2/L4 bus down Connecticut Avenue just outside my apartment building. And of course, constantly thinking up strategies to ask my friends to give me rides when I need to visit a chiropractor or when the dinner party’s run into double overtime.

So it was with absolute rapture that I whizzed my way through the District for the first time ever. It’s a delight to navigate through this Byzantine labyrinth of little streets with funny names, numbers, and letters. This ain’t no downtown San Diego, boy. It takes true brains to get from Point A to Point B. It’s complicated. No other city I’ve touched has had such a dizzing variety of four, five, and six-street intersections, circles, and squares. Or blocked off government roads. Or parks that suddenly interrupt your commute. And where else can you find a city with four different instances of 5th and K Streets? NW, SE, SW, NE. Beat that.

So you know the Metro map. You know where Wheaton and White Flint is. You know the difference among Congress Heights, Capitol Heights, and Columbia Heights, and how to get to all three from Farragut North. You know the original name of Van Dorn Street. Whoop-dee-doo. You get a gold star.

But if you can tell me how to get from Chevy Chase to Takoma Park, then make a drop-off at Gallaudet, then visit Reiter’s Books near Farragut Square, and then pull into your Capitol Hill home, all without looking at a map, then I’ll be impressed. Even more if you can rattle off your tongue all the circles, squares, and Capitol streets you drive through. Now that’s where you display your true mettle as a DCer. Anyone can do the Metro. But not everyone can do the street-level strategizing that turns an ordinary driver from Sioux Falls into a NSA cartographer.

What other city boasts Nebraska, Connecticut, and Nevada passing within a few blocks of each other? Where else in America would Massachusetts, Connecticut, and New Hampshire touch each other all at once and mark that occasion with a grandoise fountain? Florida and California, both so alike and yet so apart, pinch each other’s sun-kissed cheeks in Adams Morgan. North Carolina and South Carolina appear to be siblings but never greet each other. You’d find Utah, New Mexico, and Missouri in the Northwest, but Virginia, Delaware, and Maine in the Southwest. And Minnesota in the Southeast. It’s all crazy. And come on, who’d have thought Wisconsin would be the epicenter of D.C. style and substance?

Blue. Green. Yellow. Bah. Give me Connecticut and New York Avenues anytime. And a car to navigate them all, of course. Because, you see, all road trips come to an end and my friend took back her maroon Hyundai (with a considerably higher odometer reading). And I had to passively ride the lonely, predictable Metro back home.