Montgomery's Hometown Draws
A Visitors Bureau Tour Shows Off Some of the Attractions That Put the County on the Region's Must-See Map

By Cameron W. Barr
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, May 11, 2006

Let's say you have visitors coming to Montgomery County and you're trying to figure out what to do. Of course, the District is but a short drive away. But take another look around your county.

Is it music you want? Go to Strathmore. The stage? Consider the Olney Theatre Center for the Arts. A gallery of gruesome medical curiosities? Well, that's in Northwest Washington, but really, really close to the District-Maryland line.

Promoting tourism in Montgomery County might seem futile in light of what is available in the nation's capital, but a tough sell doesn't deter Montgomery's Conference and Visitors Bureau, a nonprofit corporation funded in part by hotel-occupancy taxes.

Last week, the bureau ferried a busload of concierges, hotel sales directors and event planners around the county to remind them of Montgomery's charms.

Visitors to the county generate nearly $1.4 billion a year in economic activity, said Kelly Groff, executive director of the bureau. She said the bureau organized the tour to promote visits to some key attractions: the American Film Institute's Silver Theatre and Cultural Center, the Music Center at Strathmore, the National Capital Trolley Museum, the National Museum of Health and Medicine and the Olney Theatre Center.

The National Mall and other Washington landmarks can doubtless hold their own against the suburban competition, but many tour participants said they learned about attractions closer at hand.

The timing of the tour was perfect for Karen Caver, director of sales at the Residence Inn by Marriott in Gaithersburg, who moved to Montgomery from Ohio nine months ago.

Visiting downtown Silver Spring for the first time, standing under the marquee of the AFI Silver Theater, she pronounced the tour an eye-opener and praised Montgomery's cultural diversity. "I really love the melting pot of this area," she said.

But the headline item on the tour -- the $100 million Music Center at Strathmore, opened in February 2005 -- was hardly news to Hayford Tetteh, a concierge at the Hyatt Regency Bethesda. He already sends guests to Strathmore and says they return satisfied.

The Hyatt and Strathmore are both on Metro's Red Line. That makes transportation simple for the guests at his hotel, who typically don't rent cars. Sending them to other attractions is another matter.

"There are a lot of things to do in Montgomery County, but are they easy to get to? No," Tetteh said.

Oddly enough, one of the stops on the bus tour memorializes the sort of efficient public transportation that people sometimes pine for in the Washington area. The National Capital Trolley Museum in Colesville offers visitors a chance to ride trams and trolleys decommissioned from the District, Canada, Florida, the Netherlands and elsewhere.

The track takes riders through the woods, which feels incongruous, since the trolley is a quintessentially urban form of transport. But the ride also offers the chance to experience a trolley's fast, electric-powered acceleration and speeds of up to 20 mph. "Cheap thrills," said a smiling Wesley Paulson, the museum's volunteer director of development.

Visitors to the National Museum of Health and Medicine can see the bullet that killed Abraham Lincoln. "I didn't even know [the museum] was here," said Lee Callicutt, director of sales at the Summerfield Suites in Gaithersburg, as he peered into a display case housing shards of Lincoln's skull and a lock of his hair. "This is really interesting."

The institution is on the Walter Reed Army Medical Center campus, which is of course in Northwest Washington, not Montgomery. But it's just a few blocks south of Silver Spring and may wind up in Bethesda in a few years' time as a result of Walter Reed's move to what is now the National Naval Medical Center.

The museum mixes the historical and the anatomical. "It's the only museum where there's a brain and spinal cord still attached on display," said public affairs officer Steven Solomon.

The concierges and sales directors were rapt. Who knew humans could get hairballs, and pretty big ones at that? A human hairball the size of small kitten -- removed from the stomach of a 12-year-old girl who, yes, chewed her hair -- is something to tell the folks back home about, although perhaps not at mealtimes.

Tetteh might have been blase about Strathmore, but not the Health and Medicine museum. "To me each and every one should have a chance to visit that museum," he said.