Six D.C. tours to try

If politics is Washington’s official sport, then complaining about tourists gumming up the works is our favorite pastime.

“Tourists in Washington have three modes of walking in public: The mosey, the saunter and the amble,” Post columnist Gene Weingarten tweeted on a recent Sunday.

Loading...

Comments

• Weigh In
• Corrections?

Personal Post

Secretly, though, we envy them. We see them clustered on the Metro and eating breakfast at coffee shops near their downtown hotels, and we wish we were the ones preparing for a day of sightseeing in the Nation’s Capital — instead of running late for our 9 a.m. meeting.

Stop wistfully wishing: Whether you’re a lifelong Washingtonian, here only for a summer internship or still unpacking after a recent move, all of this — the monuments, the memorials, the museums — is yours, too. And there’s no better way to acquaint (or reacquaint) yourself with Washington than with a guided tour.

We think you’ll be surprised by how much you’ll learn when you allow yourself to be a tourist in your own town, whether by land, by sea or by Segway. Climb aboard as we test out some of the District’s most popular tour options.

— Alex Baldinger

Open Top Sightseeing

“There’s Washington, and there’s D.C.,” is a common refrain about the nation’s capital, and there’s a lot of truth to that: There is the Capitol, the museums and the monuments, and then there are neighborhoods with local flavor, where fourth-generation Washingtonians and fresh transplants rub shoulders in restaurants and bars hidden within gorgeous federal architecture. Open Top’s double-decker tour gives you a clear sightline of both.

The red buses loop through Washington on three “lines”: The red line circles the Capitol, stops at the museums, gives you the best view of the under-construction Martin Luther King Jr. National Memorial. The short blue line heads to Arlington Cemetery. But it’s the yellow line that can expose tourists to at least a smidgen of that real D.C.; it rolls into Dupont Circle and Adams Morgan, points out the shenanigans at the Mayflower and stops at Georgetown’s murky canal. (You can switch lines without having to pay more.)

Despite a lack of great insider trivia, the ride to the many top stops is a boon in the humid summer months; just be sure to invest in a guidebook, too, for the full experience.

Something I learned: Foggy Bottom was once home to breweries; in fact, the Kennedy Center’s famous perch once housed Heurich Brewery.

Who would enjoy?: Anyone who wants to try to squeeze in all of their Washington sightseeing into a day or two, and people with mobility issues or who aren’t used to doing a lot of walking.

If I were giving my own tour: I’d weave in more history and detail. The red line tour seemed to miss the chance to tell riders the story of the Washington Monument’s construction, and Ford’s Theatre felt like a bus depot rather than a historical location. This recorded tour is awfully thin, and Washingtonians will not help but notice that it skims over significant stories while offering minutiae about rather insignificant places.