NYC tourguide Jim Dykes takes a Washington D.C. vacation in the "swamp"

Recently the tourguide became the tourist! I took a few days off and travelled south to Washington D.C. (the swamp, as they say); it’s been a few years since I visited the nation’s capital and it was fun to enthusiastically play tourist. We visited the Capitol grounds and the memorials such as The Lincoln Memorial, the Vietnam Memorial and others. D.C. is a city of statues, memorials, wide boulevards and elegant green spaces with huge stone government buildings scattered all over the place. Apparently when the city was laid out by famed French architect Pierre L’Enfant, he specifically laid out extremely wide boulevards everywhere because he fully expected that eventually it would develop into a grand capital city with processions and military parades, etc. This happened but it took more than 100 years. In the early days, apparently, people complained that D.C. was nothing but big, empty streets full of mud and horse manure EVERYWHERE which must have made strolling impossible in most areas.

My favorite historic site was Ford’s Theatre where we took the tour….it’s fun to see an elegant old Broadway-style theatre restored to it’s pre-Civil War appearance with regular guided tours and a very nice museum attached. And there’s the actual box seat where President & Mrs. Lincoln sat on that fateful evening in 1865. Today no one sits in that box…it’s decorated with red, white & blue banners to the upper right of the stage (Stage Left). Instead of a usual tourguide, we were entertained by a person who gave us a 15-minute performance enacting a person’s memories who had been there the evening of the assassination and had committed his memories to paper. It was a bit over-dramatic to have basically a dramatic reading at 10am but oh well. He was a fairly good amateur actor but I would have preferred an actual tourguide describing the events instead of a one-man show spouting a “first-person” monologue.

Across the street is a great museum built into the Petersen house, a former boarding house where Lincoln was taken and passed away eventually of his wounds inflicted by the actor John Wilkes Booth.

We also enjoyed taking photos all over town but I was amazed at how many barricades are now in front of The White House grounds. It’s really hard to get anywhere close to the building without using the zoom feature on your camera.

We stayed with old friends who work in media and just happen to have a gorgeous two-bedroom apartment right smack in the middle of town. Later we were treated to a drive in the Virginia countryside to see the Antietam Civil War battlefield and some wine-tasting in the picturesque suburbs outside of the nation’s capital. We were there during a very hot, humid late July-early August so it was refreshing to drive in the country…I was amazed at how many vineyards and wineries have popped up in Virginia in recent years. A great summer getaway! We also got to connect with my old friend Victoria Leacock Hoffman, whom I'd only seen a few times since attending her wedding 10 years ago since she relocated from New York to D.C. with her husband and son. Victoria lives in the comfortable Adams Morgan district and we brunched at The Line Hotel (a former Christian Science church).

Also had a nice visit with an old friend who lives near the gorgeous National Cathedral- his great aunt had been married to President Woodrow Wilson and since both Mr. & Mrs. Wilson are interred in the great Cathedral, he gave us his own personal VIP tour followed by a delicious lunch nearby. He also drove us thru the fabulous Embassy Row district of elegant mansions owned by various international governments and gave us his own narration (much better than a commercial sightseeing tour).