'Escape Plans' Introduction By Roger Piantadosi

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This book would not have been possible without your countless hours of hard work. Yes, your work.

We Americans, including the more than seven million of us in the Washington-Baltimore metropolitan area, spend far too much time with our noses to the grindstone. Others know better. Some Europeans, for example, evidently spend about two months less than we do each year toiling at their jobs.¹ Can you imagine working two months less a year? You want to explain that to the boss, or should I?

More likely, you and I will find some extra weekends now and then, maybe even squeeze in a third or fourth day, and head for a hideaway, slow down the engine, remember the rest of life.

Thanks to our long hours, our quick getaways have become precious treasures. In fact, the Washington area is filled with people who, with their equally overworked mates or TV'd-out kids, hunger for effective escape. They are people who work hard but whose weeks are often smoothed and shortened by their hopes or plans for the weekend: to be on a mountaintop, a beach towel or a massage table, to savor a sumptuous meal on plates they won't have to wash, to trek through the rich array of cultures and history surrounding the nation's capital.

I know, because as editor of The Washington Post's Wednesday Escapes page, I get a lot of their calls and letters and e-mails. Although the requests are remarkably varied, most everyone seems to seek the same thing from those of us at the paper whose work focuses on life after work: More, they say. Tell us more about hiking with llamas in Virginia, or about that little Swiss town in West Virginia, or the place in New Jersey where you can watch either the birds or the people on the nude beach. And what about that romantic bed and breakfast that makes its own herb sausages and is right next to Whatsit National Forest? What about those Civil War battlefields, Chesapeake Bay historic sites, to-die-for bargain stores, special weekends in New York or Philadelphia, beaches, antique shops, whitewater rafting, the slots of Atlantic City, the Amish of Pennsylvania? People in the Washington area, I've discovered, are exceedingly appreciative of being told where to go.

"Escape Plans" tells you where – and, even better, how and why – to go. For all of the Washington area's escape artists, and for anyone else itching to pack a bag and make a swift getaway (meaning one that's generally within an hour to four hours of the Beltway), it is meant to be a useful and wide-ranging palette. Here, in one place, are the details of more than 75 destinations – enough information to chart out years of non-work joy and adventure.

While this guide is based heavily on writings from the Escapes pages of The Post and regional travel coverage from Weekend, Travel and the Sunday Magazine, a great deal of new material also has been added . This, of course, is in addition to all the updating, consolidating, rewriting and organizing that's been done to make the book as useful to you as possible.

The escape routes, you will see, are organized into four D.C.-like chapter quadrants – Northwest, Northeast, Southwest and Southeast. Each chapter contains enticing brief essays on different parts of the quadrant, followed by the practical information you need – other attractions, lodgings, restaurants, directions, prices, special packages and the like – to help you choose your own route. Each major destination is followed by still others in that neck of the woods, with each of them also chock-full of details for escape planning.

In general, the listings emphasize smaller or independently owned inns and restaurants over those that are part of big national chains. There are phone numbers for every establishment and visitor-information organization listed, plus large numbers of Web addresses to use for checking the dates of regional festivals, special performances or details of other attractions that interest you. Before you go anywhere, in fact, it would be wise to call or to browse through Web pages for any other information you might desire.

May it all help make your next escape successful – and one of many to come.

¹The Overworked American: The Unexpected Decline of Leisure, Juliet Schor, Basic Books, 1993.