Expedition returns from previously-uncharted Land of Mary

This article was posted as an April Fool’s joke.

Word came over Instagram today that an expedition of H Street twenty-somethings in search of a downhill bike route to Columbia Heights have returned from what was previously thought to be uncharted land north of Washington, DC.

Friday night, 23-year-old social media producer Roald Amundsen and a group of friends set out from Little Miss Whiskey’s at 11th & H NE on their fixed-gear bikes in search of the fabled Northwest Passage, which would allow them to reach Wonderland Ballroom at 11th & Kenyon NW without sweating as much.

“Our friends loudly and drunkenly told everyone that fixies are unusable in these regions and that their drink specials are rubbish,” he said. “We shall see,” he added. “We shall see.”

However, the first sepia-toned images to surface on Amundsen’s Twitter account appear to be of a settlement in the little-understood territory called the Land of Mary, located due north of the District. Until now, all that anyone knew about the Land of Mary is that it was home to a boring and cultureless race of people who piloted large, metal vehicles in an erratic fashion, ate crab cakes, and were the ancestral home of the rich kid in somebody’s freshman year dorm at Oberlin.

Initially, Amundsen expressed dismay about the territory’s strange inhabitants after crossing Eastern Avenue, long considered to be the end of civilization, into a village he dubbed New Columbia.

“They seemed on the whole to me, to be a very uncool people,” he wrote in a tumblr post. “They all go completely without scarves and mustaches, even the men, though I saw one guy who looked like he might be a DJ.”

One day after landing in New Columbia, Amundsen claimed to have seen sidewalks, buildings far taller than any that exist in the District, and a grody dive bar in a basement. Around lunchtime Saturday, he tweeted photos of an Ethiopian restaurant.

“Eating tibs & injera at hole-in-the-wall with amazing smells. Theres like 100 of them on 1 block here in #unchartedterritory,” he wrote.

By Sunday, Amundsen and his crew found New Columbia’s three record stores and began to wonder if the uncouth villagers could be civilized. “It appears to me that the people are ingenious … I am of opinion that they would like the new Yeasayer album,” he wrote on his Facebook page. “If it’s okay with my landlord, I intend to carry home six of them to crash at my place so we can listen to it on my record player.”

While the savages of New Columbia, which Amundsen dubbed “Columbians,” were flattered by the invitation to listen to records on the floor of Amundsen’s English basement studio, they politely declined, citing job and family commitments.