THE LUXURY TRAVEL
MAGAZINE FOR INDEPENDENT
TRAVELLERS

 

Shirley, a PR consultant who has had a lifelong affair with travel, has no less than three homes – Canada, Germany and South Africa – and she travels constantly between them because she’s now married to a conductor who travels with the orchestra.

Washington rocks!
17 January 2011

Washington Capitol White House Lincoln Memorial Washington Monument Washington Cathedral

If Frank Sinatra had been to Washington in spring, the song may have been very different; except there’s a ring to ’April in Paris’ that doesn’t sound as good as ‘April in Washington‘. But April in Washington should be on everyone’s calendar… the city’s trees -cherry blossoms aside - are as green as Ireland, and almost as bountiful as a rain forest. But stay on the north or north-west side of the Capitol – they say there’s danger in some of the south. Washington’s grand architect, Pierre l’Enfant, fired from his job even before the building began for his apparent disrespect for the new city’s fathers, had some of his ideas incorporated in the final design, and the result is as gracious as any gracious European city. A grid city that makes it easy to get around, the lines are softened by wide boulevards and diagonals named for the states and the Constitution. Pennsylvania, the one on which the Obamas live, is perhaps the most well-known, broken by the White House as it is. The National Mall is central to everything, with the Lincoln Memorial on the one end, the Washington Monument in the middle and the Capitol at the other. In between you can relax at the reflecting pool or sit on the grass where alcohol is banned. Pity, at times, for a cold beer in the heat of the day after hours of walking would have been good! To get to grips, take a bus ride. There are a confusing number of buses -- two identical red open-tops but check the routes carefully for one, the Open-Top, takes you from the grand Union Station up to the majestic Washington Cathedral, across to Arlington and back to the station; while the other (Double Decker) does a little less on three separate buses. But it does offer a night tour. There are also trolley cars and buses that do similar things but after a winter in the northern hemisphere the sun in an open-air bus was just what I needed. Such a ride gives you an idea of what you want to go back to. For the myriad American tourists there were the war memorials (world wars, Korean War, Japanese part of the war, Vietnam to name some) and the hero memorials (Lincoln, Jefferson, Roosevelt, Martin Luther King to come) and statues (Taft, Ulysses Grant - the guy on one of the banknotes), the Ford Theatre where Lincoln was shot and the house opposite where he died. Of course they are attracted to the Archives to see the Declaration of Independence, the Capitol and the White House as to what really intrigued the rest of us there for just a short time …. the many (free) Smithsonian museums and art galleries. The Hope Diamond was on show at the Natural History museum, nearly 50 carats of brilliant blue, along with dinosaurs and fossils from millennia ago; the air and space museum boasts not only rockets and moon landing vehicles but the Wright Flyer, the original - not a replica - that Orville and Wilbur flew more than 100 years ago, and Lindberg’s Spirit of Saint Louis. The National Gallery of Art has two wings and is a banquet … not as many Impressionists as, for instance, the Metropolitan Museum in New York, but a fabulous array in its east and west buildings. At the top of the east building, designed by IM Pei and fronted by a serried rank of fractured Louvre glass pyramids, you walk into the Tower where a handful of large Mark Rothko canvases stare back at you, black. Until your eyes get accustomed and you see the different colours and sub-texts, being hauntingly enveloped in a piece of contemporary classical music, Rothko Chapel, composed by Morton Feldman for a small ensemble. I tracked down a painting I have long wanted to see – the Luncheon of the Boating Party by Renoir. It’s in the private Phillips Collection, close to prestigious Dupont Circle. Also on show there were the gorgeous paintings of Georgia O’Keefe, as well as some photographs of her by her photographer husband Alfred Stieglitz. But Washington is for walking. We were staying on F Street NW, close to the Kennedy Centre with its huge concert hall, opera house, theatres, meeting rooms and millennium stage with free daily events, all as a memorial to JFK. The glass chandeliers and art work, the gifts of several nations, seem to reflect the style of Jackie O. We were close to the Lincoln Memorial which was home to joggers making use of the steps day and night, if there was space in between the busloads of visitors and kids wanting to be photographed in front of Abe, also day and night. From there one could walk across the Potomac to Arlington Cemetery to pay more homage to JFK and his two brothers, or the other way to the Washington Monument and look up to the White House. (We stopped there to take in a tea-party protest and laughed at the ignorance of some of the people we spoke to. I was hoping Sarah Palin would come but instead got a lower ranking British lord who talked about America’s president having been born in Kenya … see what I mean about ignorance?) Or carry on to the Capitol and the Library of Congress along the National Mall flanked by many of the Smithsonian museums – First Nation Art, African art, Asian Art, American history and so on. A short distance away was the Holocaust Museum and on the other side, the Newseum, an interactive miracle which blends five centuries of news with up to the minute technology. The city’s architecture is grand, from the gorgeous houses of trendy Georgetown (where we saw the only beggars and homeless on this side of town) to the neo classical elegance of the government buildings and museums. There’s a law, we heard, that states that no monument in Washington may be taller by more than a few metres than the block on which it is built … which means the Washington Monument on the National Mall has the edge for some time to come. We had some great meals – across the Duke Ellington bridge in another trendy area, Adams Morgan, in the city central and in Georgetown. Maybe because it’s a city of diplomats many of whom work along the desirable Embassy Row, fast food outlets were not the norm. Then there’s Washington the cliché … you really expect Jodie Foster to come running through the trees close to the Lincoln Memorial as a bunch of soldiers did several times in the early morning, chanting ‘….. Marine Corps … Marine Corps‘. Or the unmarked cars that suddenly have a red or blue light flashing in the window, rather like the detective television series we are all so exposed to. And Washington wails. Cape Town’s cops and ambulances and fire engines rushing up De Waal Drive or the Eastern Boulevard are few in comparison with the fire engines and ambulances and cop cars that have the run of the city 24/7. Leaving my hotel at 4.30 am to catch a plane, to Canada and thus away from the disruptions of the volcanic eruptions, the street which edged the George Washington University campus had a number of police cars … all courtesy cars for kids who required a ride home, whenever and in whatever state. So for them, too, Washington rocks.