My D.C. (a response to My Seattle)

• The Metrorail system, which takes me more or less quietly and cleanly many of the places I need to go, and which is still being expanded. Dodging tourists at Smithsonian station.
• Winesap apples. Places where I can get at least a decent bagel.
• More than one public radio station, so that I can switch off during pledge week or when those idiots on "Car Talk" are talking.
• The National Gallery of Art. The Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden. The Phillips Collection. The Corcoran Gallery of Art. The Smithsonian American Art Museum, though I wish they'd stop changing its name every other year.
• From the upper stories of most buildings here in Northern Virginia, I can see the Blue Ridge.
• There is almost too much community theater in this metropolis.
• The weather is almost perfect. There are four recognizable seasons. Hurricanes and tornadoes are extremely rare, earthquakes unthinkable. But the occasional ice storm I could do without.
• Bookstores, cozy restaurants, movies, a few shops, the passing scene in Dupont Circle.
• I can drive to a lot of places scenically on the George Washington Parkway, Canal Road and the Clara Barton Parkway, the Rock Creek and Potomac Parkway and Beach Drive, the Baltimore-Washington Parkway.
• The blacktop paths connecting most places in older Reston, slipping through people's backyards and around the golf courses.
• The Potomac River, surging through Great Falls, down Mather Gorge, rumbling under Chain Bridge, to the relaxed estuarial waterfront at Alexandria. The rowing fours and eights at the watergate and Roosevelt Island. When the wind is out of the south, watching the planes bound for DCA slalom down the river at 90 second intervals.
• The Contemporary American Theater Festival every summer in Shepherdstown, West Virginia. The periodic Sugarloaf crafts fairs.
• What I would miss most of all: Huntley Meadows Park, more than a thousand acres of woods and wetlands less than an hour from the White House.

posted: 11:57:08 PM  

I care what Bill Hangley, Jr. thinks.

posted: 9:50:02 AM