What do you do when you need a vacation and your best friend happens to be going on a work trip to Washington, D.C.? You join them, of course! Well, at least that's what I did. My friend works for a company based in D.C. and they needed her to come to the office for a training, so I decided to tag along because one of my other friends said it seemed like I was in need of a vacation. So that brings me to writing this recap of my trip to Washington, D.C.
If you're new to Kimi's Travel Thoughts, I recap my trips by categories and summarize what I did while also providing helpful tips in case you decide to take a similar trip. Keep reading to find out how I made the most of 3 days and 2 nights in the Baltimore/Washington, D.C. area!
Lodging
I saved money by staying in my friend's room at the hotel since that would allow me to be in a comfortable hotel for free. That meant I had more money not just for flights, but also food and activities -- even though you know I love free activities. We stayed at the Courtyard by Marriott in downtown Silver Spring, Maryland which allowed a reasonable commute to the office and it was still in a good location to allow easy access to nearby attractions. It's in the heart of downtown, so there was shopping next door and up and down the street along with a great selection of restaurants. Definitely a nice area!
Transportation
I used several forms of transportation to get to and around Washington, D.C. during my trip. I didn't take every single form of transportation, but I tried to utilize as many as I could!
Flights
After some debating, I chose to fly Southwest Airlines round trip. Not only is it my preferred airline, but the company is also a travel sponsor for my job. They recently extended A-list Preferred status to all staff for the summer and I can be A-list Preferred for a full year if I take four flights within 3 months! This trip covered half of the total flights I need. Southwest was not the cheapest flight option. However, it was cheaper than most other airlines and I had rewards and perks to focus on. Flying during the week rather than on the weekends is cheaper, so that was another opportunity for me to save money. I also had more money to budget for flights because I wasn't paying out of pocket for the hotel.
There are three different airports that can get you to Washington, D.C. One of those is actually "in" the city (really Arlington, VA) and the others are in Baltimore, MD and Dulles, VA. It's generally cheaper to fly to Baltimore/Washington Thurgood Marshall International Airport (BWI) and take the train into D.C., so that's what I planned to do so I could save money and easily get to the airport on my last day in the Capital City.
Trains
Amtrak is the train operator that I rode to get back to BWI as my trip came to an end. It's very affordable with ticket prices ranging from $5-$25 for one-way economy rides between Baltimore and Washington, D.C. To Baltimore, it's a brief ride of about 30 minutes from Union Station in D.C. and there's a free shuttle from the train station in Baltimore that takes you to the airport.
Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority (a.k.a."Metro")
One thing that I hadn't originally planned on doing was taking the Metro. However, the red line took us directly from Silver Spring into D.C. and that was the most affordable, efficient and eco friendly option. If you have the Apple Wallet or Google Wallet app on your phone, you don't even need a physical card to use the Metro. You can set up a digital SmarTrip card in your phone's wallet app and reload as frequently as you need to from wherever you are at any time. You can do this for some transit services in other cities as well! If going back and forth for about 2-3 days in the D.C. area like I did, you'll need roughly $15-20 on your SmarTrip card to get yourself started.
Ride Share
We were able to determine that Lyft was cheaper than Uber by about $5-7. I usually use Lyft anyway, so I committed to that whenever I needed a ride. I was staying in a Maryland suburb so it was easier to take a Lyft upon arrival at BWI. If you choose to take a ride share service from the BWI airport, just make sure to carefully read the signs that explain where to go and the signs posted by the doors with the door numbers (they're not very large). This will help you determine you if you're in the right location or not.
Walking
I initially wanted to take Lyfts around D.C. until I realized it's extremely walkable and everything that tourists visit are all within walking distance of each other. Even my friend's office and the coffee shop next door to it were just a couple of blocks from the White House! I figured that out after taking a Lyft to the National Museum of African American History and Culture and quickly noticed walking was something I could've done instead and saved some money. That being said, it's still a lot of walking if you decide to just do and see as much as possible in single day. If you want to avoid miles of walking, hop-on/hop-off tour buses can reduce the amount of walking you do. Otherwise, you just have to spend at least a week in D.C. to break up the time you spend at each major tourist hotspot.
Activities & Food
Day 1: Monday
I woke up early to get ready to leave my apartment and drive to the airport with my mom who flew in the day before so we could go to dinner and attend the Janet Jackson concert. I met back up with her between our gates in the airport because we were using different airlines to get to our respective destinations. I had a timely and smooth flight to the airport in Baltimore. Southwest doesn't typically have a lot of planes going in and out of the BWI airport, so most of the gates were empty when I arrived. That worked out perfectly because I needed to jump on a Zoom meeting for work. After that meeting ended, I hung around the airport for another hour before ordering a Lyft because I wanted the price to drop. Plus I needed to wait until my friend was making her way back to the hotel because she had the key to get into the room.
Once I got to the hotel in downtown Silver Spring and got settled, we ordered dinner from Burger Fi which was right next door to the hotel. It was reminiscent of Hopdoddy (a gourmet burger spot originally from Austin) and the food was good. The burgers are smaller than what I expected, but I'm from Texas so that might actually be the normal size of burger in any other place. The chicken tenders are also very good and so are their sauces. They have natural cut fries, so if that's not your thing, you may not enjoy the fries. When we finished eating dinner, we chatted some more before it was time to get ready for bed with an early morning commute on deck.
Day 2: Tuesday
My plan was to attend two museums this day, but I severely underestimated how long it would take me to go through a Smithsonian museum. We took the Metro into Washington, D.C. on the red line and I went to a juice and coffee shop called Joe and the Juice for breakfast while I waited for a couple of hours to pass before catching a Lyft to the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History & Culture. The Smithsonian museums are all free to visit, but you should reserve a ticket online in advance to ensure you will be able to enter on the day you plan to go. It turns out I could've walked there in about 15 minutes, but I rode in a car and got there in about half the time. I didn't trust myself to figure out where to go on my first day in D.C.
After getting oriented to the building with help from the team at the welcome desk, I started out at the Afrofuturism Exhibit which is a temporary exhibit that opened back in March 2023 and will remain open for one year. My brother, Mr. Well-Travelled, is an entrepreneur with a focus on Afrofuturism. I told him about this exhibit last year when it was announced, but here I am being the one that goes to check it out first! So many artifacts from movies, television, music and other significant forms of Black history, entertainment, and entertainers was on display in the space. When I finished viewing it all in amazement, I went to the History floors of the museum. It was chilling to walk through and see what my ancestors and even my living family members had to endure and continue to endure to this day in various ways. I took many pictures throughout the History floors, but the lighting was dark to reflect some extremely dark times and the pictures will need some additional editing before I can attempt to share them on social media.
After spending a couple of hours below ground where all of the history was laid out and making a visit to the waterfall in Contemplative Court to reflect on all I saw, I attempted to get some soul food for lunch from the café. Unfortunately, it was the lunch rush and I was on a time constraint. So, I kept going to explore the upstairs levels of the museum where the contemporary information and exhibits were located.
The Contemporary exhibits featured the history of African Americans in media, art, film, migrating west, sports and more. This included basketball which is my favorite sport! Fun little story about sports section of the exhibit: A group of middle school or maybe early high school boys were looking frantically and getting very excited about the prospect of seeing LeBron James pictures and artifacts. They were taking selfies and the museum staff member for that area even helped with taking group photos for them. The group then communicated their requests to her for more Bron artifacts and even asked for him to have his own exhibit even though she has nothing to do with museum curation. Additionally, they had LeBron vs. Michael Jordan debates and insisted the museum has an obsession with MJ (who has a statue in the basketball section) when it should be LeBron James.
So why would I tell a story that's not directly about me? While I was excited about going to the NMAAHC, I think it's important to highlight this moment that both the museum staff member and I thought was very funny and heartwarming all at once. If I had to describe those few minutes, it would be best described at "Black Boy Joy". These kids were so excited about being at a museum that features a sport and an athlete they clearly love and could not contain their excitement by any means. And they didn't have to contain it. You should've seen the middle school tour group that was racing through the Afrofuturism museum to see the Black Panther suit worn by Chadwick Boseman himself! That's what museums are for. They preserve history, they share valuable information, and they can spark joy in others. I love museums for all of these things and it was fun to see others at the NMAAHC be so thrilled to visit that day.
Once I finally got through the entirety of a very informative and interactive museum and got some souvenirs from the gift shop, I caught the red line train back to the hotel in Silver Spring to rest my feet. It took 5 hours to get through the entire museum and that's only because I was moving at a faster pace towards the end. There's so much information and in there and it's interactive from start to finish. I needed to power up my body with some healthier food and went to CAVA for dinner because they had new menu items and it was down the street from the hotel. Then, I spent the rest of the evening relaxing after a quick trip to the H&M a couple of doors down.
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Day 3: Wednesday
On my final day in the DMV, I went with my friend and her co-worker to the office in D.C. to drop off my bags before spending most of the day at President's Park which was just a couple of blocks over. I once again went to Joe and the Juice for a repeat of the previous day's breakfast before walking to President's Park to check out everything that's there -- starting with the White House. Everything at President's Park is free to see and take pictures of while walking around. It's honestly A LOT of walking so comfortable shoes are a necessity! I saw iconic statues, memorials and monuments such as: National Mall, Lincoln Memorial, Washington Monument, Vietnam Memorial Wall and the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial, and more. There's a hidden bookstore and gift shop at the Lincoln Memorial that is so small I'm pretty sure they just squeezed it into a converted storage closet. I also had lunch from one of the refreshments kiosks to rest my feet and give myself the necessary fuel to finish up what ultimately became a total of 7.1 miles in walking distance by the time I got back to the office. I had to take a couple of breaks along the way to rest, but I also used that time to play Pokémon Go. I even had about 26 minutes with my Slaking defending the White House gym! Pokémon Go still has an impact on those who play the game and the trips they take all these years later after I initially wrote about how it could potentially do that when the game was first introduced.
This was also the day when the smoke from the wildfires in Canada really began to arrive in Washington, D.C., so I also was breathing heavier from the pollution. The smoke was so thick that I had to wear a mask the entire time I was walking around. You can tell just how bad the smoke was in my picture of the U.S. Capitol. It was the smoke that prompted me to cut my final day of exploring D.C. short by a couple of hours. I needed a place with air conditioning and an air filter!
After I got back to the office, I began sorting my pictures from this trip and working on drafts for my blog (including the one for this post) until it was time to change clothes and prepare to depart Washington, D.C. My friend and I took the red line to Union Station where we got dinner at the shops before going our separate ways. She took an Uber to Dulles Airport and I took the Amtrak to BWI. I'm now set up with CLEAR Plus thanks to a guest pass from my brother. That made for a smooth screening process and I quickly made my way through security before locating yet another empty gate to continue writing the draft for this post before boarding my flight.
Wrap-Up
Rarely do I write my blog posts in real time (hence, why this one is longer than usual), but I was able to find a lot more down time in this trip than what I typically can with others. I'll be completely honest here and say that a trip to Washington, D.C. or really anywhere in the DMV was never on my radar, but I'm so glad I took this mini vacation. I needed a break from work and to spend time with one of my best friends! As I was researching fun activities to do just in D.C. alone, I had far more I wanted to do than what was achievable in the timeframe of my visit. I would like to come back to visit Washington, D.C. again in the future to get to more activities on my list and encourage you to check out the city one day if you haven't done so before.
There's so much to do for people of all ages and with many of the main attractions being supported by taxpayer dollars and sponsors, there are plenty of free activities to do over the course of several days. I mostly explored solo and felt safe doing so because of all the secret service around, but it's also great for groups and families. I wouldn't consider a trip to Washington D.C. to be as ADA-friendly as it could be, but it appears everything was ADA compliant even though that did mean having awkward routes or entryways to navigate.
With so many other places on my travel bucket list, I'm not sure how soon I would want to return to D.C. However, I do know that I'm going to need to return to Washington, D.C. for the Cherry Blossom Festival one day and try to cross off a few other things on my sightseeing list!
Feel free to leave comments below, tweet (@KimiThoughts), or leave a post/message on Facebook (@KimisTravelThoughts) to share your memories from trips you've taken to Washington, D.C.!