I have friends out in SF (and other parts West) who tell me "Oh, I'd love to come to DC sometime and see all the sights!"
I tell them: Save the airfare. Just drive down to LA and spend all day on the freeway, sitting in traffic. By the time you've reached 4 hours of bumper to bumper traffic, you've seen it.
Getting around inside the city means Metro, mostly. It's quite user-friendly (thank the Smithsonian for that), but doesn't always take you where you wanna' go.
Outside the Beltway, you need a car. You also need keen insight as to which backroads to take, because the main roads... Are constantly choked.
Trafficland.com and traffic.com have, on several occasions, saved me upwards of an hour of sitting in traffic on the Beltway.
Consistently, LA and DC are the worst two nonstop traffic jams in the US. I've driven all over this promised land, and I cannot argue that fact.
The Metro here is pretty good, but its funding is on thin ice: They're being called in on a $40M loan that had been guaranteed by the now-hosed AIG. As a result, the creditor is in court crying for cash. The judge... probably realizes that Metro is used by a HUGE majority of Fed Gov staff every day, and doesn't want to be the guy responsible for single-handedly shutting down the United States Government when we can't get our asses to work.
Yes, lots to see here. Cherry blossoms in Spring are incredible. Foliage in Fall (until last weekend) was astonishing. In between those two times, it's either a frozen wasteland, or a steaming swamp.
And... stuck in Chantilly? That's really its own circle of hell.
And anywhere close. Most govvies work early hours to avoid the rush (it seems to be cultural), so rush hour starts at about 3 to 3:30. It ends somewhere around 8 PM. It just bites. Metro if you can, schedule around it if you can't. This sort of thing is also why I didn't get to your hotel until nearly 7, despite having left home right at 5.
I tell them: Save the airfare. Just drive down to LA and spend all day on the freeway, sitting in traffic. By the time you've reached 4 hours of bumper to bumper traffic, you've seen it.
Getting around inside the city means Metro, mostly. It's quite user-friendly (thank the Smithsonian for that), but doesn't always take you where you wanna' go.
Outside the Beltway, you need a car. You also need keen insight as to which backroads to take, because the main roads... Are constantly choked.
Trafficland.com and traffic.com have, on several occasions, saved me upwards of an hour of sitting in traffic on the Beltway.
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The Metro here is pretty good, but its funding is on thin ice: They're being called in on a $40M loan that had been guaranteed by the now-hosed AIG. As a result, the creditor is in court crying for cash. The judge... probably realizes that Metro is used by a HUGE majority of Fed Gov staff every day, and doesn't want to be the guy responsible for single-handedly shutting down the United States Government when we can't get our asses to work.
Yes, lots to see here. Cherry blossoms in Spring are incredible. Foliage in Fall (until last weekend) was astonishing. In between those two times, it's either a frozen wasteland, or a steaming swamp.
And... stuck in Chantilly? That's really its own circle of hell.
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