My husband and I just returned from our visit to Washington DC from 5/25 to 5/30. We started planning our trip by listing all the places we wanted to go, then going to each website to research their hours, and seek out any scheduled tours, programs, or events we might be interested in, so we could plug those things in our itinerary. The museums offer many special tours and lectures, and great programs for kids, and targeting your visits around these events make for a much less haphazard museum experience. Just so you know, we do not have kids, and both my husband and I have a huge interest in art, so our trip heavily emphasized the art museums, while leaving out some very popular attractions like the zoo and the spy museum.

Since this was a last minute trip, it was too late to get White House tickets, or to reserve a spot with an Archives tour (which can be done on the website at least 6 weeks in advance and after visiting the Archives, I would recommend it). But 9 days before our trip, I called our Representative and got Capitol tour tix without a problem. We purchased Holocaust Museum tix on-line, and decided against the Washington Monument since we didn’t want to be tied to a “time” on our schedule for that, and almost everyone else has said that the visit to the Post Office Tower is much better without lines (even with a ticket). For the evenings, we purchased Capitol Steps tickets online, and a reserved a Segway tour of the monuments at night. Once we plugged in all of our tours and events into our itinerary, we were able to make mealtime reservations to reduce our waiting for tables at some of the “DC hot spots” that we wanted to be sure to visit. We made reservations for lunch at Jaleo, dinner at Johnny’s Half Shell & Komi.

Two invaluable tools for planning the trip: Google Earth, a free downloaded program, is amazing. I will never plan another trip anywhere without it ever again! Using this interactive program, you can choose what features you want to see on a satellite map. For instance we could see where restaurants are in relation to hotels, museums, and metro stops, so we could easily plan our route to the sites and restaurants we wanted to visit to minimize our walking. Or we could search for a specific restaurant, such as Jaleo, and see where its location is along the bus line. You can plot out hotels in an area, you can add/remove the metro, the trains, the airport, etc. There is a tool that will allow you to calculate walking distances.

The other tool we used religiously was the DC Circulator Bus map. The DC Circulator Bus was a life-saving gem for me, because I need to walk as little as possible. There are three routes: one around the Mall from the Washington Monument to the 4th Street by the Air & Space Museum. Another north-south route along 7th/9th Avenues from the convention center down to the waterfront. The third is an east-west route along K street from Wisconsin Ave in Georgetown and then along Massachusetts Ave to Union Station. It costs $1 per ride, and transfers are free. Contrary to other information that has been posted on the board, you DO NOT ride all day for $1. The transfers are good for 2 or 3 hours, I forget which. After that, you have to buy another fare. Print out the route map from their website and keep it with you during your visit.

We arrived at Reagan airport around midnight Thursday night, after sitting on the airport runway in Chicago for 2.5 hours. We didn’t want to take the Metro that late, so cab to our hotel was around $15. Because of everyone’s recommendations, we chose the Jurys Washington centered right on the Dupont Circle. We booked on Entertainment.com and got the regular rate of $145 for 3 weeknights, and a discounted rate of $125 for Saturday and Sunday nights. There is also a $60 rebate from Entertainment.com. (There is a hefty 14.5% tax on hotels.) Our room was NOT good. It was on the 7th floor, way in the back overlooking the roof deck with the air conditioners below. The room was very small, blandly decorated, and the bathroom was about the size of a phone booth. When you sat on the toilet, your leg was squished into the wall next to you. The sink was a very small, wall mounted sink with NO counter space, very poor lighting. The only ventilation in the bathroom was the window in the shower/tub that allowed me to shower in full view for all in our nation’s capital to see. But we were exhausted and wanted to sleep, and we figured that we wouldn’t be bothered by the small, drab room while we were snoring. Still I wondered how my fellow Fodorites could have steered me so wrong to recommend this hotel. I’ve had better rooms at the Motel 6. But the killer was the air conditioning unit that loudly clomped on and off all night. The next morning I marched down the front desk to demand a new room.

Our new room was like we landed in Oz. The room on the 4th floor overlooked the Dupont Circle, but you could not hear the street noise. Decorated in browns and greens, there were down pillows and a thick fluffy light green down duvet on the bed. A flat screen TV mounted on the wall, a green velvet sofa across from the bed. The large bathroom was tiled in beige marble, had a heat lamp, a phone on the wall, and a speaker directly to the television so you could listen to the morning news while showering. The huge shower had multiple shower spouts in the wall. And the air conditioner….sweetly quiet.

The location was superb. Steps from the Metro. Across from Kramer Books. A CVS if you forget anything from home, or to purchase a few power bars and bottled water each day. Safe area, we made the walk after midnight several times and the area was always busy. So many options for dining with many of DC’s top rated restaurants within a block. Outdoor cafes everywhere. Street musicians playing on the circle at night.

Friday morning, Metro ($1.35 pp) to the Smithsonian stop and arrive at Air & Space Museum by 10:00 am to be one of the first in the door. We made a bee line to straight to Gallery 103 where the flight simulators are located. They are $7.50 pp (2 people required – or $15 for one person) for 4 minutes of thrill. But what a thrill it was. With hardly a wait, we hopped right into a simulator. He was the pilot and I was the gunner while we spun 360 degrees and hung upside down in our harnesses to shoot enemy planes. (We found out about these on the website, so we knew we wanted it to be our first stop before the lines formed.) Then we headed straight to the Welcome Center and joined a 10:30 tour of the museum highlights. We learned that other than Disneyworld, the A&S Museum is the most popular attraction in the world. Our tour was done by an ex-American Airlines pilot, and was excellent, I would highly recommend it. But it lasted 2 hours, and was too long. I would recommend doing the first hour of the tour, and skipping the rest. The first hour covered the dawn of flight thru to Appollo, and again, was excellent. My father worked in the aerospace program in the 60’s, and he designed components on the instrument panel of the Mercury & Gemini. What a thrill to stand next to history that he helped to create. If you want to see bigger, more recent planes, there is a shuttle that will take you to the Udvar Hazy Center.

By 12:30, I needed to sit down for a bit, so we made our way over the Planetarium and watched “Infinity Express – A 20 Minute Tour of the Universe.” It was $7.50 per person and totally not worth it. Skip it and see a 3-D Imax film instead. (The 3-D Imax is much better than the regular Imax films.)

Time for lunch. We left the A&S museum and walked next door to the American Indian Museum to eat lunch in their Mitsitam Café because of everyone’s recommendations. Very cool building, no right angles or sharp corners. Lunch was pretty good, with great variety, but beware, it is expensive. We had a pulled buffalo sandwich ($8 -- a little dry), a lobster roll ($8), roasted beets ($2.95), smoked squash with raisins ($2.95-- interesting flavor), succostash (2.95), and a fruit drink made from citrus, pineapple, and blue maize ($3.95 thick and very sweet). It came to $32 for both of us. (Did I mention that tax on food is 10% -- ouch!) While good, I can’t say that it was worth $16 per person. I wanted to get a macaroon afterwards, but at $3.95, I decided to skip it.

Now to the Vietnam Memorial, which might seem strange to schedule this next because it’s at the complete opposite end of the mall from the Indian museum and I need to minimize walking. No problem…the DC Circulator bus stops right outside of the Indian Museum. (Be sure to get a transfer every time you get on the bus.) We took that to the Washington Monument, and walked the short distance to the Vietnam Memorial. While the other memorials can be seen beautifully at night, this was one that I wanted to see during the day.

At the Vietnam Wall the mood and the atmosphere changes instantly. Polished black granite stretches on in it’s below ground-level trench, reflecting the sky and your own image looking back at you, while you stare at name after name of lost lives in the Vietnam War, over 58,000 names listed in order by date of their death, in a war that was never really “won” by either side. There were Rolling Thunder veterans gathered around the wall wearing leather medal-covered vests and baseball caps that read, “Freedom is Not Free,” while every once in a while I saw one occasionally wipe a tear from behind his sunglasses. Some people traced the name of a loved one lost onto paper. Even though I lost no one close to me in this war, and at 41 I am too young to know about it personally, I found myself choking back tears, as I couldn’t help but ponder on this Memorial Day weekend where the next memorial might be erected to our servicemen who lost and who will lose their lives in today’s war with Iraq.

Next we walked to the Lincoln Memorial. As I walked up the hill from the Vietnam Wall, I look up at the white coliseum against the bright blue sky and I am amazed by the sheer enormity of the building. I cannot see Lincoln inside, but the size of the building, with tiny little “spots” of people on the steps seems surreal and it takes my breath away. As we approached, I said to my husband, “I feel so Lilliputian” and he understood the reference. As we climb the stairs, and the stairs change from concrete to marble, we see Lincoln, larger than life, where he sits and keeps watch over the entire Mall and beyond, as if he is the king of court. Is he watching what we’ve grown into over the past 140 years since our nation’s bloodiest war? Is he proud of us? Or does he sit in judgment and admonish us with his powerful words that are sketched into the stone edifice around him?

Standing on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, when I turned around, there is the image of the Washington Monument pointing back at me in the reflecting pool. I am tired now, and my feet are hurting, so we decide to go back to the hotel to rest. I don’t want to walk the distance back to the Circulator bus or the metro, so we decide to take the MetroBus, the regular bus, which stops right across the street from the Vietnam Memorial, and will deposit us within a block from our hotel. Our DC Circulator transfers will let us on the bus for an additional 35 cents. (We printed the bus routes from the Metro website – very helpful.) While waiting for the bus, it started to rain, not too heavy, and good thing we thought to plan ahead and bring our umbrellas. So there we are, sitting on the curb at the bus stop, enjoying the light warm rain showering down on us, when my husband says, “It could be worse….it could be raining sideways.” And then there is a crash of thunder, and the rain starts coming down sideways on us.

Back to our hotel to dry off, and then to the Reagan International Building for the Capitol Steps. We purchased tickets on-line for $39 (including $4 Ticketmaster rip-off fees) but there were plenty of empty seats and we could have bought them there to avoid the fees. The performance was hysterical and well worth it, and there is no bad seat in the small theater. For those of you who don’t know, Capitol Steps is a series of musical skits and political satire performed by ex-congressional employees. Their motto is “Who put the ‘mock’ in democracy?” They sang songs like “What a difference DeLay makes” to the tune of “What a Difference a Day Makes.” We laughed all night and I’d highly recommend the performance if you are up on current events of the day.

We had to leave the performance a little early to make our reservation for dinner at Komi. The 5-course tasting menu ($64) is a MUST! We had an appetizer selection of dates stuffed with mascarpone, soft shell crab, tempura fried squash blossom, procscuitto, fresh olives, goat cheese with cucumber & anchovy, crositini with 2 different toppings, and others that I can't remember right now. Next there is a pasta selection, the entree, a cheese course, and then dessert (donuts with chocolate mascarpone pudding –YUMM!!). We had the wine pairing ($40), a different wine with each course, 5 wines that are matched perfectly with the food, and the servers never let our wine glasses get empty! They just kept refilling them! I can't recommend this restaurant enough, it was one of the best meals that we’ve had in a while, and my husband and I are total foodies from Chicago, which is a huge food town.

Wow, I can't believe how long this is, and I've only covered the first day. I'll post the rest of my trip later, and I'll try to be more brief. Sorry if I'm boring everyone.
Leslie

MORE, MORE!!!

I live here just outside of D.C., and I am amazed at how you planned and the great stuff you did. I have friends coming in from Houston in Augst and I am following this report closely for info on things to do w/them and what to book ahead of time! GREAT report so far.

I want to hear about the Segway night tour!!

GREAT report. I'm one of those who have been stating the $1 for the DC Circulator is for all day. It was in March; maybe a promotion as it's NOT what the website said ... Thanks for setting me straight.

I can't wait for Day 2.

First, there are two corrections to my trip report from Day One. 1)We Metro’d to L’Enfant Plaza to go to the A&S Museum, not the Smithsonian stop. 2)Transfers to/from the DC Circulator to a Metrobus are free, not 35 cents. So if you have your DC Circulator transfer, you can get on the bus for free. I think the transfer from the MetroRail to the DC Circulator might have been 35 cents, but I can't quite remember correctly at this point. At any rate, ALWAYS get a transfer.

Day Two – Saturday

First stop...shopping at the Comfortable Shoes store in Dupont Circle to see if there is anything better than my Mephistos and my Danskos. My feet are killing me, and I think we’ve hardly walked that much yet. At the end of the day, I am so thankful that our hotel is only a very short walk to the Metro!

Today is gorgeous. One of those textbook beautiful gift-from-God days, with the gentlest breeze and hardly any humidity. We get a late start, so we begin with lunch at the National Art Gallery Sculpture Garden Pavilion Café. It is noon on a Saturday on a holiday weekend, and there is no line and there are plenty of clean tables available. The café offers sandwiches, wraps, paninis, and pizzas. We decide to eat light and we split a smoked turkey and brie with cranberry mayo wrap and chips ($8) and a fruit and cheese box ($8) that has wonderfully ripe melons, pineapple, star fruit, grapes, mango, and some sliced cheeses. We ate on the curved stone benches around the sculpture garden fountains, every once in a while the wind would mist us from the fountains. Perfection.

After we languished for a while, we hopped on the DC Circulator Bus, and rode it around to the Hirshhorn Museum. Hirshhorn himself collected mostly sculptures, even the building looks like a giant circular sculpture on the Mall, so we began in the Hirshhorn sculpture garden and then moved over to the sculptures on the museum plaza. The sculpture garden is really wonderful, beautifully landscaped, and with wonderful examples from Moore, Calder, Rodin, Ernst, Miro. It is a quick, easy, and peaceful walk through the sculpture garden, and it was one of my favorite exhibits the whole time we were there.

The Hirshhorn Museum showcases American contemporary and new artists. You have to really love modern and contemporary “art” to love this museum. We quickly toured the lower level of the museum on our own, and then browsed the neat things in the gift shop while we waited for the 2pm tour of the 2nd and 3rd floors. The tour lasted one hour, and did a good job covering the highlights of the Hirshhorn. I think that the tour is just enough time needed to spend in this museum, other than the sculpture garden.

After the Hirshhorn, we went to the American History Museum. There were no lines to get in, but inside there are kids everywhere, and each displayed item (and there are a LOT of items!) has a very lengthy text description. There is SO MUCH to see, and we are instantly on overload. We had scanned the museum website ahead of time to write down the exhibits that might interest us (EXCELLENT suggestion from a Fodorite), but we found ourselves less interested than we thought we’d be. Dorothy’s ruby slippers were, well, red sequined pumps in a glass case that held no magic for me in person. Archie Bunker’s chair – was a chair – no different than it looked on television, and no different than any other wingback chair that needs a good cleaning. My husband remarked that the displays looked dated and dog-eared, and we could see that it was a good time for this tired museum to get an overhaul. Some of the exhibits that we were interested in seeing, like the Information and Technology Exhibit, had already closed. If I had the energy, I would have loved to have seen the First Lady Dresses, but I just couldn’t do it. We quickly walked through the American Presidency Exhibit, but again, I was too exhausted and found it too overwhelming with so much information, and we didn’t really spend any time there. Perhaps this museum would have been better appreciated by us if we had devoted a single day to it and had time to enjoy it, and my feet weren’t hurting so much. As it was, the kids everywhere with boundless energy were obviously fascinated, but it held little allure for both me and my husband.

The exhibit that we did find fascinating, and where we spent the most time, was the original Star Spangled Banner, which has been under restoration for years. The huge flag was originally 30 feet by 42 feet, so large that “the British would have no trouble seeing it.” Each star is 2 feet across and the stripes are 2 feet wide. While the flag is still enormous, restoration projects through the years have shrunken it a bit, an amazing thought given its huge size today. The stories about the flag and our national anthem were wonderfully done, and I learned that scholars agree that Betsy Ross did NOT make the first American flag, a story created by her grandson. I am shocked and disappointed. Am I now going to learn there is no Tooth Fairy either???

Since we are not fascinated with this museum, we head back to the hotel to rest my sore feet, while my husband goes to explore Kramer Books. Dinner was at Johnny’s Half Shell just across the Circle from the hotel. I had the soft shell crab ($23.95) and my husband had the grilled crab cakes ($27.95). I can’t get enough soft shell crab while I’m in DC, but these are the smallest ones I’ve had the entire trip. It is served with a corn pudding that is absolutely fabulous, creamy and crunchy, but the serving is the size of my thumb. My husband’s 100% lump crab cakes are wonderful, served with some seriously crisp French fries, and a thimble of coleslaw. While the food was very good, the portions were small, and for the money ($58 for both of us) we felt there should have been more to the meal, like either a little larger portions, or a salad or soup included. I am now starting to understand that food is going to cost us a fortune on this trip. The dessert menu seemed uninspiring, so we skipped it.

The final stop for the evening, we decided to take a chance on something different for late night entertainment. After doing an extensive web search for DC night life, and not coming up with many choices, we reserved a table at Chaos, a gay bar in Dupont Circle ($5 for the table, and $5 cover pp), that is famous for it’s Drag Queen Bingo on Tuesday nights (with almost everyone attending being straight) and Drag Queen Shows on Friday and Saturday nights that begin after midnight. Now my husband and I expected that the Drag Queen Show would be great entertainment, a la “La Cage” but it was only mildly amusing and hugely cheesy. The crowd was actually much better entertainment than the "show." There were several bachelorette parties, and a very “colorful” crowd of men and women of all persuasions. After a while the show became repetitive, we drank our two-drink minimum, and left to walk back to the Jurys Washington for much needed sleep.

Thanks so much for all of your info. I am lookin forward to the rest - hurry (j/k)! I am going next week with 3 boys (9-14) and a baby girl, yikes! I am definately using your input! Thanks again.

Day Three – Sunday
First stop, CVS for blister pads for my feet. Next stop, we Metro’d to the Archives stop to tour the Archives. We had hoped to be there when they opened, but due to our late night before, and my sore feet, we didn’t make it there until around 10:45am, and by then there was a long line outside. It was the only line we encountered all weekend. It’s hot this morning, and we decided to come back at the end of the day when the lines were gone.

So instead we crossed the street to the National Gallery of Art Sculpture Garden. At the entrance to the garden, there is a stand with a sheet describing each sculpture. It took us about 30 minutes to leisurely go through this very excellent self-guided tour (even though there is a formal tour that we were sorry we missed.) This sculpture garden also offers some excellent photo ops at the Giant Typewriter Eraser, and the Lichtenstein Pop Art House. At exactly noon, we started to hear the loud rumbles of the motorcycles from Rolling Thunder.

The motorcycle “demonstration” for the POWs/MIAs and improved Veteran’s benefits, begins at the Pentagon and goes to the Capitol along Constitution Avenue, and there is a constant stream of motorcycles, thousands upon thousands of motorcycles, that lasts until 3pm. Three hours of rolling motorcycles! Every fifteen minutes or so, the police force a break in the stream of motor bikes so that people may cross the street. We sat and watched Rolling Thunder fly by for a bit, and then I stopped at a street cart to buy some “hundred dollar bill” bath towels for gifts for my nieces & nephew ($10 each), and then we walked up 7th Street for our lunch reservation at Jaleo. (We could have taken the DC Circulator right to the restaurant’s front door, but it wasn’t running due to Rolling Thunder.)

The menu at Jaleo is expansive, and be aware that tapas portions are quite small, many of them are only 2 or 3 bites and cost as much as a full entree. On the waiter’s recommendation of being one of “the most excellent dishes on the menu,” we ordered the piquillos, 2 small (and I do mean small) sweet red peppers stuffed with goat cheese and mushrooms ($6.95). They were tasty, but not memorable. Then we had suckling pig confit stuffed with wild mushrooms, dried fruits, pine nuts, and a mushroom sauce ($8.95). Now THAT was excellent. Is it inappropriate to lick the plate?? We also ordered chicken stuffed with trumpet mushrooms and raisins ($7.25), another awesome dish. Still hungry, we ordered the pulpo, or grilled octopus, served exactly the way we had it in Spain, on a wooden plate, sprinkled with oil, and served with a potato in the middle ($5.95, a bargain if you know the price of this dish normally). My husband and I love grilled octopus, but it is a difficult to prepare it very tender, and this was tender perfection, although I would have preferred more of a grilled flavor. We also ordered fritters of bacon wrapped dates ($4.95), 6 little pieces of heaven, each a little bigger than a tater tot. Definitely order those! We ended with a very awesome flan for dessert. The entire meal, 5 tapas and dessert, came to $45.10 before tip.

We left Jaleo and it was an easy walk down hill back to the National Gallery of Art East Building for more modern art. The East Building is a large, expansive space with a glass-roofed atrium which is just as impressive as the art. Inside that atrium is the largest Calder Mobile I have ever seen. Unbelievably huge. It is an easy walk through the museum to see works by Picasso, Miro, Lichtenstein, Warhol, Magrite, Calder, Pollack, Rothko, O’Keefe. Make sure to see the Calder room, filled with mobiles and stabiles of all sizes, filling all four walls with delightful moving shadows. Unfortunately, we were not able to see the Matisse cut-outs in the Tower Gallery. The hours of this exhibit are limited to restrict the exposure of the artworks to light. If you want to see this exhibit, the Tower Gallery closes by 2pm, although I could not find information about this anywhere on the website. Also, I would have loved to do the guided tour, but we had nearly completed the building by the time the tour started. But the little bit of the tour that we did see was just excellent. We did not have time during this trip to visit the West Building, and unfortunate miss. However, there is a helpful link on the website, “What to see in the West Gallery in one hour.”

We walked down to the basement to see the “Cascades” and have a cup of coffee in the cafeteria. Very cool space, and a very large art bookstore. Later, we learned from a tour guide that the Cascades cafeteria is considered to have the best cafeteria food of all of the Smithsonian museums.

After we rested, we walked back to the Archives, and by now, about 6pm, there is no line to get into the building. The movies ended by 4:15, I believe, so we missed the opportunity to see those. We entered the Rotunda to see one of four copies of the Magna Carta in existence (and this one purchased by Ross Perot), the badly faded Declaration of Independence, the original Bill of Rights, and the Constitution. Afterwards there are a great many things to view in the Public Vaults exhibit area, which depicts the types of documents collected there, and shows how you can research your own family history, through ship manifests, war service records, etc.

Metro to hotel from Archives stop back to Dupont Circle, and we ate at Sala Thai for dinner. (10% off coupon on their website.) We ordered the shredded papaya salad, which is a favorite of mine, but it was way too spicy for me to eat, so my husband finished it off. We also ordered the soft shell crab and it was delicious. It was quite a large crab, covered in a yummy coconut-curry sauce and some vegetables, served with rice. Very different and very impressive. I don’t remember what else we ordered there, but I do remember that it was quite good. After dinner we walked down the street viewing the shops, I stopped and bought a t-shirt, and then we went to Teaism where I had some of the best ginger scones that I’ve ever had. We didn’t try anything else there, but you can tell that these people take their scones and cookies very seriously. We returned to our hotel to watch the Memorial Day Concert at the Capitol Building from the quiet comfort of our beds.

Day Four – Monday, Memorial Day

Forget the metro, now we’re taking cabs everywhere. My feet just can’t take it anymore.

We walked across the street from the hotel and sat outside at the Afterwards Café at Kramer Books to enjoy a leisurely brunch. My husband had a bagel with smoked salmon, cream cheese, capers and caviar ($14.95) and it was one of those wonderful flavorful, chewy New York bagels, not the fluffy tasteless bagels that so many places carry. I had a very excellent omelet with crabmeat, asparagus, cheese, and a lemon sauce ($16.95) served with potatoes and fruit. Brunch came with mini muffins, VERY fresh squeezed orange juice, coffee, and a mimosa, and some of the most friendly service of our trip. When I commented to our waitress on how friendly people have been in this city, she said that DC had the “best of both worlds”….northern sense, and southern hospitality. I couldn’t agree more.

Next to the Holocaust Museum with tickets that we bought online. Cab fare was around $9 to the museum from our hotel…a bargain at that point, because we spent 4 hours on our feet at the Holocaust Museum. It goes without saying that the Holocaust Museum is emotional, moving, haunting, frightening, and hopeful all at the same time. The entire building is constructed so that every corner, every tile placed, every window, is “askew,” meant to feel jarring and make you feel unsettled. During the 4 hours we spent there, I think my husband and I barely uttered 3 words to each other, as if speaking in this place was too irreverent. At one point, there was a young girl, maybe 13 years old standing in front of me, reading out loud one of the exhibits, while her mother hovered next to her and supervised her reading. The sound of her young voice reading those grisly words became too emotional for me, and I choked up with tears and had to move on. On the stairwells in between floors, there are glass walls with the names of villages and towns that were wiped out during the war. I found Lomza, Poland sketched into the glass, where my great grandparents were able to escape during the pogroms before the war. After that, everyone else perished.

You cannot help but to keep thinking, during this tour, how history today would be so different if any one of a number of things had changed. How my life, my family would be different today. How the world would be different. Throughout history, great men, like JFK and Martin Luther King are not allowed to live out their lives for the better, yet men like Hitler survive. And how can we defiantly declare “Never Again,” and yet how can we turn our backs on Rwanda and Darfur today?

The one thing that I am disappointed about is that because we scheduled this visit on a holiday, there were no tours or docents speaking. So many Fodorites said that one of the best parts of this museum was the volunteer docents who provided poignant and touching information, and I was so sorry to have missed them. However, we did spend about 30 minutes watching the survivor’s film at the end, and it is absolutely not to be missed.

After the museum, we are ravenous, so we bought 2 hotdogs at a street cart ($3 for a 3-bite dog) and head home to rest before our Segway Tour tonight at 6:30.

We reserved in advance with DC Segway tours ($70pp). We chose this company for 2 reasons, first being their tours are twice the length for the same price as other tours, and second that they had a nighttime monument tour. We chose to do the segway tour instead of the Nighttime Monument Tour on the bus.

We begin with a 30-minute on using the segway, how to emergency stop, etc, but it takes all of 2 minutes to learn how to use it. Now, at this point, I need to set you straight about a few things. The segway tour is advertised as an “opportunity to get off your feet,” but you are standing on your feet for 3.5 hours or more, so keep that in mind if you decide to schedule this. Also, the segways are not allowed near the monuments or on the Mall, so we had to park the segway and walk around the monuments, a 1.5 mile hike that I was in no way prepared for, after having stood on my feet at the Holocaust Museum for 4 hours earlier that day. Finally, the order of the segway tour is up to each individual tour guide. Our guide decided to do the monuments early in the tour, and at 7-8pm in May its still daylight, so we missed seeing the monuments lit up at night, one of the primary reasons we chose to do this activity at night. So if you do this tour, BE SURE to tell your guide that you want to do the monuments AFTER it gets dark; they are very accommodating. Okay, those are the caveats. Now to tell you about the tour….

Let me start by saying that once I got over standing on my feet for 4 hours, this was the highlight of my trip. The experience is like something out of the Jetsons, you are standing still but moving, and the slightest shift of body weight on your feet controls your movement forward or backward, and how fast you go. A flick of your wrist controls left and right turns, and you can spin around on a dime. Spinning around like that was great, silly fun. The seven in our group followed our tour guide like chicks behind a mother goose, crossing streets, we all sped along whizzing by pedestrians, dodging in an out and around planters and trees in front of national buildings.
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We began by heading down Pennsylvania Avenue to take pictures in front of the White House, and then past the Old Executive Office Building, and the Blair House, which I recognized from West Wing. Then we headed down Constitution Avenue and parked the segways to do a walking tour of the monuments, with helpful commentary from our cute college student tour guide. Once again we visited the Vietnam Wall, which our guide told us was the result of a college school project, and the student who designed it got a B+ from her professor on this design. This is our second visit to the Wall, and on today, Memorial Day, the atmosphere is a little different than it was the first time we were there. First off, there are many more children, so there is much more commotion. Secondly, the base of the wall is now lined, literally covered, with memorabilia and mementos that were sparsely present on our first visit…books and army boots, framed medals, pictures, letters, artwork from children, flowers and flags.

My husband and I skipped the Lincoln Memorial, having been there earlier, and we walked ahead to the Korean War Memorial, which was quite crowded, but nonetheless haunting. There are actual photographs of servicemen etched into the granite wall, and they look like white ghosts and spirits watching over the memorial. Then onto the very large WWII Memorial which was long overdue for the 400,000 US servicemen who died in that war.

As it is now dark, we zip back to Pennsylvania Avenue for more pictures in front of the now lighted White House. Up until this point, we have been using the segways at 6 miles an hour, but now our guide takes out his magic keys and kicks it up a notch to 8 mph, and he lets us just have fun playing around in front of the White House. We felt like children as we ran slalom past each other, and turned in circles on our segways around the Secret Service van parked in front of the illuminated White House, all under the watchful eyes of the CIA snipers up on the roof.

Next we head east on Constitution, stopping at each of the museums along the way for stories and information. Crossed the mall at 7th street, and stopped for a photo op of the Capitol which by now is lit up. Back down various side streets north of Constitution, around the Ronald Reagan Center, past the Navy Building, while listening to Stars and Stripes being played by the Navy Band during their Memorial Day Concert. Very Cool.

After this most fabulous adventure, we returned our segways to the Willard Hotel, and hobbled next door the Washington Hotel for a drink at the Sky Terrace. We sat overlooking the Treasury Building and the White House behind it, with the illuminated Washington Monument and Lincoln Memorial in the distance. We ordered an artichoke spinach dip and chips with our drink and our view. The view was fabulous, the food was mediocre, and it’s hard to make mediocre dip! What a shame that one of the few places in Washington with such a great view doesn’t serve better food. The lights turned off at the White House at 11pm. Must be bedtime for W. It sure is bedtime for me, and we cab it back to our hotel.

ttt