The Capital and Its Old Ports

The capital is best taken with its neighbors, since Washington was drawn on a map in the seventeen nineties but the ports on either side of it were already old, and the three together make a better trip than the monuments alone. This route runs city, river town, bay town, wants three nights, and is best in spring, when the blossoms stop the whole region, or in October, when the crowds have gone back to school.

Give the capital the first night and day, and give it as the residents would. The monuments are correct at dawn or after dark, walked, not bused, and the great museums are free, which means one wing chosen deliberately beats three museums endured. Spend the afternoon in a neighborhood instead, Georgetown's brick streets down to the canal, and take dinner there among the rowhouses. If it is late March or early April, the cherry blossoms around the Tidal Basin at seven in the morning justify the entire trip on their own.

Drop ten minutes down the Potomac to the port that was thriving when the capital was still a survey. Old Town runs its cobblestones and eighteenth century rowhouses down King Street to a working waterfront, and the correct visit is a long afternoon, the torpedo factory turned art studios on the river, a browse up the hill, and dinner in one of the taverns that have been at this for three hundred years. Sleep here rather than in the city. The mornings are quieter and the coffee is closer.

End at the sailing capital on the Chesapeake, where the colonial streets funnel down to the City Dock and the harbor conducts its business under the dome of the old State House. Watch the midshipmen on the Academy grounds, take a sail on the bay if the season allows, since this is the town for it, and finish with crabs, done the Chesapeake way with mallets and paper, at a dock house with the water lapping under the deck. The capital's marble is a fine thing, but the region's soul lives in these two old ports, and it eats better.