Home Sweet Home – Washington DC

My family visited us this year for the 4th of July, so Brian and I got to turn the tables and be the tour guides for a change. Below is a list of our favorite things in the DC area.

Our Top 10 DC List:

• Walk around the monuments at Night (See Route Below)
• Visit the Air & Space Museum (especially the Udvar-Hazy Center at Dulles if you have a car)
• Museum of Natural History (rocks, dinosaurs)
• Go up in the Washington Monument/Old Post Office Tower
• Museum of American History
• Tour the Bureau of Printing and Engraving
• Visit the White House (either walk around the outside, or if you are lucky the Garden Tour is nice, we personally weren’t too impressed with the inside especially considering the hoops you have to jump through to get a tour)
• Visit the Capitol Building
• Get outdoors and visit Great Falls
• For food, we recommend visiting Union Station or Chinatown – lots of choices and the scenery is neat.

Our Walking Tour Map:

The Monuments are really neat to see at night. The Lincoln and Jefferson memorials are really well lit and the glow takes awesome pictures. Also, there’s something really neat about the Korean memorial at night. The darkness makes you think about and appreciate everything that the troops did. Plus, it’s not as hot and there’s much fewer crowds. We highly recommend it.

Here’s our map that involves 100% walking & public transportation. It hits the following: Smithsonian Metro, Jefferson Memorial, Franklin Roosevelt Memorial, Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial, WWII Memorial, Korean War Memorial, Lincoln Memorial, Vietnam War Memorial, and ends at Foggy Bottom (just keep walking straight North from my map a couple more blocks), all with the Washington Monument in the center of your tour. A total of 3.8 miles, but it’s very flat and there are nice, even sidewalks the entire route.