The last time I visited Washington, D.C., I was 16 years old on my high school trip. We toured the White House. (The Blue Room! The Green Room!) We took a photograph with our very handsome congressman, Rep. Donald Rumsfeld, on the steps of the Capitol.
Fifty years later it was time to return, only this visit was with my friends Janet, who now lives in Munich, and Lynn, who lives in Los Angeles. Back when we were all living in Chicago, single and in our 30s, we’d vacation together. Now we do have husbands, but we agreed: We needed a girlfriend trip.
The destination was Lynn’s idea; her high school class in Waterloo, Iowa, never went to D.C.
She was in charge of hounding her congressional reps for tickets to tour the Capitol. I was in charge of the White House, and found out those tours were suspended because of the COVID-19 pandemic. (Tours resumed on April 15, 2022, too late for our visit!)
So, we started with the Lincoln Memorial, the number one most visited monument in the United States, and took photos at Abe’s giant marble feet. We stood at the fence on Pennsylvania Avenue to gape at the White House, with Lynn exclaiming, “It’s smaller than I expected!”
On my first visit, the National Museum of African American History and Culture and the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum had yet to be built. The U.S. was still fighting in Vietnam; now the names of the more than 58,000 U.S. military killed in that war are engraved on the 140 black granite panels that make up the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. I doubt that our teenage selves would have fully appreciated the emotional gravity and deep history of these testaments to the past. On this visit, I got it.
Beyond experiencing the awe of the monuments, the girlfriend trip was a rousing success with several surprises:
People in D.C. are warm and friendly. And young.
Ask someone for directions, and Uber drivers, hotel clerks, restaurant servers and strangers on the street all want to help. And, if they don’t know the directions, they whip out their phones to check Google maps. We were surprised at how hip and young everyone looks — aside from the more seriously dressed government workers.
But with multiple colleges and universities in the District of Columbia — among them American, Catholic, Georgetown, George Washington and Howard universities — maybe we shouldn’t have been so surprised.