I attended a conference recently in Washington, DC. I was in the city for five days and although mostly busy with the conference, tried to get out and see the sights at night.
Having become an avid cyclist at home in Calgary, I have realized that there are so many things to see from a city’s bike paths, so my plan was to rent a bike for a couple of hours each night in order to get some exercise, and tour the city a little bit. I did the research before I went down and found a good site for Washington cyclists (local and visiting) that offered useful information about the trails, safe zones in the city, and places to rent.
After the first conference day, I started calling up the rental companies from the hotel. It turned out, there was one very close by and they actually offered guided tours as well. I was all over that because I liked the idea of having someone else show me around a little bit in order to get a feel for where things were.
The tour was not what I expected but a worthwhile investment nonetheless. I guess I expected to be doing more biking, but in fact we did very little biking and spent most of the time wandering through the different monuments and memorials instead. That was perfectly fine though, because I wanted to get to that anyway, and our guide was a wealth of information. We visited the Washington Monument, the Reflecting Pool, the World War II Memorial, the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, the Korean War Veterans Memorial, the Lincoln Memorial, the Jefferson Memorial, and Franklin Delano Roosevelt Memorial.
The folks at Bike the Sites gave out preferred rider cards, so I went back twice after that to rent for a couple of hours and get out to do some real riding. The trails where pretty impressive (way better then Calgary), and the weather was thirty and above every day.
The conference hotel where I stayed was downtown, and was surrounded mostly by government buildings, so the bike idea was definitely handy for getting beyond that. I thought I had lucked out with the bike tour when I first learned of it, but I think it was a common theme (that and segway tours) because it simply allowed tourists to cover more ground in a shorter period of time.
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