AROUND THE USA

Washington, D.C., is a capital place
to visit

• Updated in 2000 •

We lived in the Washington, D.C., area for nearly four years in the early 1990s. Our feelings about the place are ambivalent. There are parts we like and parts we don't.

Uh-oh; that sounds like something a politician would say. Perhaps we were infected with Potomac Fever. Will a Martini cure it?

Our experiences and opinions vary greatly with the nature of the visit, so we offer two tracks of information, depending on your intentions.

On either track, we generally use the term "Washington" to refer to the entire Washington, D.C., Metro Area. This includes Northern Virginia and the Maryland suburbs as well as the District of Columbia. The official MSA also includes Baltimore since the 1990 census, which Maryland's capital is not happy to proclaim.

Visiting Washington

No matter how long your trip, you will nearly always return home without doing everything you might like to do in Washington. The possibilities are endless. We'll let the travel books list all the sights and focus our efforts on tips and suggestions for being most efficient. You might want to filter these opinions by knowing that we have aversions to bad food and long lines. "So does everyone," you say. Well, then, why are so many people are standing in line at McDonald's? We first visited Washington in the 1980s as a tourist. We later lived here for a few years (1992-96) and subsequently returned frequently on business.

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Most of the major chains are present (Hyatt, Marriott, Sheraton, Hilton, etc.). But we're always on the lookout for smaller places that are well-managed and in excellent condition.

We regularly stayed at the Dupont Plaza Hotel and recommend it highly. We sampled several others before settling on this one. Also worthy, though slightly more expensive, is the George Washington University Inn.

The Dupont Plaza Hotel is on Dupont Circle and is less than two blocks from the Dupont Circle Metro station.

Metro is the only way to go for a tourist in Washington. Trying to drive and park on your own is a kamikaze maneuver guaranteed to complicate a vacation and probably cost you a bundle for parking, parking tickets or worse.

Dupont Circle is a very active and generally safe neighborhood in the city's desirable Northwest sector. It's adjacent to the Embassy District, and various diplomatic facilities are scattered in every direction. It's friendly to pedestrians and offers a complete range of eating choices from Burger King to The Jockey Club. You'll also see a variety of alternative lifestyles, so it's not a good place for the narrow-minded or easily shocked.

Many people choose to save money by staying at hotels/motels in the suburbs and riding Metro (or worse) downtown each day. This wastes time and energy shuttling back and forth. (For more about Washington traffic, see Living in Washington below.) We think it would be less expensive to shave a day off of your trip and stay in the District. You'd save a day's meals and lodging and save about a day of riding on Metro.

Our favorite places to visit are the Lincoln Memorial, the Museum of American History and the National Building Museum (best gift shop in Washington).

If you spend a day around the Mall downtown, you'll probably get hungry about the middle of the day. And then you'll realize -- there are no restaurants within sight! We've heard the upstairs restaurant at the National Air and Space Museum is good, but we know from experience the downstairs restaurant is on par with Mickey D's -- ugggh.

The lunchtime secret is about a block from the Mall -- the Old Post Office Pavilion, which is immediately across the street from the Federal Triangle Metro station. It's an historic site in its own right, but it also includes a very good food court -- on par with a shopping mall. In particular, it's near the Museum of American History and the Museum of Natural History.

If you want to tour The White House, you'll do better if you contact your congressman as far in advance as possible to request tickets for the VIP tour. You'll avoid long lines and get a better tour, but you can't sleep late that day. Otherwise, get in line for the regular tour.

Living in Washington

Living in the Washington area is overwhelmingly colored by transportation issues. You are as you commute. We cannot overstate the depth, breadth and pervasiveness of transportation issues in the daily lives of those living there.

The location of your work combined with your basic values about how you like to move around will define and limit your choices of homes, shopping, neighborhoods, recreation and lifestyle.

This is written with the assumption that you will work in or near the District of Columbia, simply because that's true for most people in Washington.

If a car is optional and you want a quick commute, you'll hope your office is near a Metro station and you'll seek housing that's near a station, too.

If your wheels are part of your identity and you need the morning drive to listen to the radio, drink coffee and get in sync with the world, you will have more choices about where to live. But you'll spend an enormous amount of time looking at the brake lights of the cars in front of you.

Washington's highways are constantly under construction and always being expanded, but it's never enough. The smoothest rush hour is bumper-to-bumper, stop-and-go traffic for miles and miles. A minor fender bender or debris in the road will worsen the congestion. Bad weather or a major crash can bring the system to its knees.

Some experts are starting to say that expanding the highways is futile. It only lures more people into their cars and into suburbs farther from the District. They advocate a slowdown of highway construction as a means of pushing people into higher density housing and onto mass transit. Car-loving Americans might recoil in horror from that suggestion, but a few years of living there can help one see the merits.

For those willing to consider mass transit, the MetroRail system is one of the best heavy rail systems in the world. Clean, safe and fairly dependable, it's like a spider with legs emanating in about eight directions from the heart of the District. But to be convenient to Metro, you will pay a premium for housing.

In the 20 years since Metro construction began, development patterns within 10 miles of downtown have been highly affected by Metro. Places like Ballston and Bethesda have experienced dramatic growth centered around a Metro station. Renters have told us that each Metro station farther from downtown corresponds to a significant drop in rental rates.

When we moved to Washington, we made an early decision that we'd bite the bullet to buy a home near a Metro station. It spared us from purchasing another car that we would have otherwise needed, and it suited our temperament. We don't regret it, but our decision certainly had its tradeoffs.

For one, we had to go to the end of the line to find a home that was large enough and affordable. "End of the line" meant a 45-minute one-way commute on Metro for a member of our household who worked in Rosslyn. Outside of rush hour, we could drive to or from her office in 20 minutes. But on the rare occasions when she drove during rush hour, the drive was nearly always 40 minutes ... and longer if someone had a flat tire in the right-hand lane.

For perspective: We calculate that a five-minute difference in your one-way commute time is equal to a week of vacation per year.

Metro was definitely cheaper. We saved the cost of another car plus the insurance, operating costs and exorbitant personal property tax that Virginia levies on automobiles. Parking near her office cost just about the same as what she paid to ride Metro.

To encourage car pools, express lanes are reserved on some interstate highways for cars with multiple occupants. Known as HOV lanes, they generally move much faster than the regular highways. But HOV drivers still have to deal with streets downtown and the pervasive construction. And the HOV lanes aren't everywhere.

Watching the various approaches to the situation was a lesson in human behavior. Some people were so eager for a free-standing home and a big lawn that they commuted one and one-half hours or more per day ... or settled for a smaller or older home to be nearer downtown.

We sacrificed our love of space for convenience and wound up in a three-story townhouse with a yard of only a few hundred square feet. We don't regret the decision, but we're also glad we have a real yard since moving from Washington.

Another primary consideration in buying a home is the ultimate in local government -- the homeowners' association. We did alright, but either of two extremes can result in major problems. An overaggressive association creates friction and dissent -- or worse -- in a neighborhood as people are riven by disputes over the most mundane matters. An overly passive homeowners' association can permit a community to deteriorate and pull housing values down in the process.

If we were doing it again, we would definitely make a greater effort to gauge the homeowners' association in advance. Through divine providence, however, we didn't have a problem. With so much dependent on your decisions about transportation issues and because of our relatively limited exposure to the market, we are reluctant to recommend specific neighborhoods. We lived in an area called Franconia, which is between Alexandria and Springfield. It was fine, but living in the Washington area was hardly the highlight of our lives. We can recommend a wonderful real estate agent -- Becky Berning of Long & Foster. It's impossible to navigate the Washington real estate market without an agent. Given a hypothetical imperative to live in Washington and a hypothetical unlimited budget, we'd obtain a smaller place as close as possible to work and a larger place an hour or two from the city in the mountains or on the beach. We'd have hired help to maintain both places, and we'd spend week nights in town and weekends away. But, all in all, we hope we don't live in Washington again.

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