Five Days in Washington, D.C.: An Itinerary for the Nation's 250th Birthday
- kaceyrose9
- Jul 5
- 13 min read
The United States just turned 250 years old. If there is a moment to go to Washington, D.C., this is it.
I have loved this city my entire life. My mother worked for the government and traveled there frequently, and as a child I went with her as often as I could. One summer, my sister and I lived there with her and we did what any sensible person does when given a whole summer in Washington: we went to every museum, tried the crab cakes at every restaurant that served them, and took every tour available.
I have never stopped going back.
Which makes it all the more frustrating that Washington is one of the most underestimated cities in the United States. Most people pass through it on a school trip and never return.
That is a mistake. The capital is a city of genuine architectural grandeur, world-class museums that are entirely free to enter, and neighborhoods that have nothing to do with the monuments and everything to do with the way people actually live. This Washington D.C. itinerary spans five days, not enough (I always prefer longer), but enough to enjoy it properly.
What follows is a 5-day Washington, D.C. itinerary that tries to include a little bit of everything, not just the marble and the memorials, but the bookstores, the jazz clubs, and the restaurants that have made Washington one of the most serious and underrated dining cities in the country.
Day 1: Capitol Hill, the Library of Congress & the National Museum of African American History and Culture
Begin on Capitol Hill, where the architecture alone justifies the morning. The Capitol, the Supreme Court, and the Library of Congress sit within walking distance of each other and together make up one of the most concentrated displays of civic ambition in the world.
The Capitol itself has been here since 1800, though what you see today took more than a century to become itself. British forces burned it in 1814 during the War of 1812, and it was rebuilt and expanded over the decades that followed. The iconic cast-iron dome was completed in 1863, in the middle of the Civil War. Lincoln insisted construction continue as a signal that the Union would hold. Standing beneath it in the Rotunda, you can look up at Brumidi's fresco, The Apotheosis of Washington, and witness the god-like status of George Washington, symbolizing the triumph of our union.
The Supreme Court building across the street is worth more than a passing glance. It was completed in 1935, and the exterior is impressive enough, but it is the interior that stays with you. The twin spiral marble staircases that flank the main hall are double cantilever ovals rising five stories without any visible support. They are among the most extraordinary examples of architectural engineering in D.C. I have never forgotten them.
The Library of Congress, just behind the Capitol, is one of the most beautiful buildings in America. The Great Hall's painted vaulted ceilings and marble staircases are worth the visit on their own, and the building holds more than 170 million items in its collection. Spend as much time as you can inside.
From there, cross to the U.S. Botanic Garden. I have a particular memory of picnic lunches on the grounds just outside, which I still think of as one of the city's best-kept secrets. It is quieter and more restorative than its position next to the Capitol suggests, and the outdoor grounds are exactly the right place to sit down and let the morning settle before the afternoon begins.
In the afternoon, head to the National Museum of African American History and Culture, the most emotionally resonant museum in the city and one that rewards more time than most visitors give it. Plan for at least three hours and reserve timed entry passes in advance. They are free but fill quickly.
Dinner at minibar by José Andrés. This requires advance planning as reservations open months ahead, but it is one of the great tasting menu experiences in the country and a fitting way to begin a serious week in the capital.
Skylark Tip: Most visitors never find out about Thursday evening happy hour at the Library of Congress. The Library is open until 8 p.m. on Thursdays, with happy hour drinks and snacks available for purchase in the Great Hall overlooking the U.S. Capitol. Plan your Capitol Hill morning accordingly and stay into the evening. The building at dusk, with a drink in hand, is something else entirely.
Day 2: The National Mall — Memorials, Monuments & the National Archives
Start the morning at Ford's Theatre, where Lincoln was shot on April 14, 1865, and where the adjacent museum tells the story of his presidency and assassination with unusual care and depth. The theatre itself still operates as a working venue, which gives it an uncanny quality. The box where he was sitting is preserved exactly as it was that night, draped in flags, looking out over a stage where performances still happen below. The museum beneath the theatre holds one of the most significant collections of Lincoln artifacts in the country, including the coat he wore that evening. Plan for at least 90 minutes.
From there, walk to the National Archives to see the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights. These three documents, written between 1776 and 1791, are more affecting in person than any reproduction prepares you for. In the year of the 250th, they carry an additional weight that is difficult to put into words until you are standing in front of them.
Continue to the White House, then onto the National Mall for the afternoon. The memorials here reward a slow pace and a willingness to read. The Lincoln Memorial, completed in 1922, houses a 19-foot marble statue of Lincoln seated and looking out toward the Reflecting Pool and the Washington Monument. Take the time to read the walls. The Gettysburg Address is inscribed on the south chamber wall. The Second Inaugural Address is on the north. These are two of the greatest pieces of American prose ever written, and standing inside that memorial reading them in full is one of the more quietly powerful experiences Washington offers.
The Vietnam Veterans Memorial is something else entirely. Maya Lin's design, a long black granite wall cut into the earth bearing the names of 58,281 Americans killed in the war, was controversial when it was unveiled in 1982 and is now considered one of the most important works of public art in the country.
The Korean War Veterans Memorial, the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial, and the Jefferson Memorial round out the afternoon. The Jefferson is best approached at dusk, when the light off the Tidal Basin turns the white marble amber and the dome reflects in the water below.
Dinner at Old Ebbitt Grill, a Washington institution since 1856 and two blocks from the White House. It is regularly frequented by politicians, some known for scandals and maneuvering. It is one of the few restaurants in Washington where the dining room itself is part of the show, where the conversation at the next table is occasionally worth more than what is on your plate, and where everyone comes to eat, drink, and conduct the informal business that never appears in any official record. Order the oysters and stay for the atmosphere.
Skylark Tip: The inscribed speeches inside the Lincoln Memorial are what most visitors walk past without reading. Read them in full. The Second Inaugural Address, delivered on March 4, 1865, one month before the civil war ended and six weeks before Lincoln was assassinated, is one of the most extraordinary things ever said by an American president. It takes four minutes to read and will stay with you for considerably longer.
Day 3: Washington D.C. Neighborhoods Worth Your Time — Dupont Circle, Embassy Row & Kalorama
Today is a slower day, which is its own kind of necessary. Washington's monuments and museums ask a great deal of you, attention, weight, moral seriousness, and Dupont Circle asks for almost none of that. It is simply one of the most pleasant neighborhoods in the city to be in, and that is enough.
The area was largely undeveloped until after the Civil War, when improvements in the 1870s transformed it into a fashionable residential neighborhood, with mansions built along Massachusetts Avenue and townhouses throughout. The circle itself is named for Rear Admiral Samuel Francis Du Pont, renamed by Congress in 1882. The marble fountain at its center was designed by Daniel Chester French, the same sculptor responsible for the seated Lincoln at the memorial.
From the circle, walk northwest along Massachusetts Avenue into Embassy Row. Of the 182 diplomatic missions in Washington, the majority are located on or near Embassy Row, and due to the concentration of well-preserved Gilded Age estates, the area has been protected as part of the Massachusetts Avenue Historic District. The Indonesian Embassy at 2020 Massachusetts was once home to the Hope Diamond. The Cosmos Club, occupying the Townsend Mansion further up the avenue, features a Beaux-Arts Louis XVI French-inspired design that stops people mid-stride.
Continue into Kalorama. The name comes from the Greek for "fine view." In 1807, the poet and diplomat Joel Barlow bought the property and renamed it accordingly. The neighborhood has been home to six former U.S. presidents, including Barack Obama. Woodrow Wilson made Kalorama his home after leaving office, and his house on S Street NW remains the only presidential residence in Washington not operated by the federal government. The streets are quiet and residential in a way the rest of the city is not, and they reward the kind of walking where you are not going anywhere in particular.
One detour worth making: the Spanish Steps, tucked between S and Decatur Streets. Modeled on Rome's famous steps, they now lead up a steep hill to a small fountain and a city view best appreciated on a summer evening. Most visitors never find them.
Kramer's Bookstore on Connecticut Avenue has been a Washington institution since 1976, one of the few independent bookshops left in the city with a genuine point of view and a café attached. This is the kind of place you linger in for hours.
Dinner at Bistrot Du Coin on Connecticut Avenue, a proper French bistro, warm and unapologetically old-fashioned, with a zinc bar and a menu that has not needed to change. Reserve ahead as it fills early.
Skylark Tip: The Spanish Steps are Washington's best-kept secret and the right place to end a slow afternoon with something cold to drink. Almost no one knows they are there. Walk up to the top, find a spot on the steps, and stay until the light changes. It is one of the quieter pleasures this city keeps entirely to itself.
Day 4: Free Museums in Washington D.C. — the National Gallery of Art, the Smithsonian & Penn Quarter
The National Mall's museum row is among the greatest concentrations of free cultural institutions in the world. Today is for the ones that reward the most time.
Begin at the National Gallery of Art, which is really two museums in one. The Gallery was conceived and given to the people of the United States by Andrew W. Mellon, a financier and art collector who served as Secretary of the Treasury under four presidents. The West Building, which opened in 1941, houses works from the 11th through the 19th centuries, including the only Leonardo da Vinci painting in the Americas, as well as works by Monet, Rembrandt, and El Greco. The Rotunda was modeled on the Pantheon in Rome. The East Building, which opened in 1978, is a different experience entirely. I.M. Pei was selected to design it, and the modernist structure he conceived was inspired by its trapezoidal site between Pennsylvania Avenue and the National Mall. To visually unite the neoclassical West Building with the modernist East, Pei clad his building in the same pink Tennessee marble, linking old and new in material if not in spirit. The soaring triangular atrium, with Alexander Calder's monumental mobile suspended above it, is worth visiting as architecture as much as museum. The two buildings are connected underground by a concourse animated by Leo Villareal's Multiverse, a tunnel of lights that surrounds you as you pass beneath 4th Street. Walk it in both directions.
From there, the National Museum of Natural History for the Hope Diamond, which is smaller than most people expect and more compelling than any photograph prepares you for, and the ocean life hall.
The Smithsonian American Art Museum and the adjacent National Portrait Gallery, housed together in the stunning Greek Revival Patent Office Building, round out the afternoon. The Portrait Gallery's presidential hall, where every president is rendered in chronological succession, is one of the more quietly unsettling rooms in Washington.
Washington's Smithsonian museums number fourteen on the Mall and nearby, which means you will never run out of reasons to return. The ones listed here are my own first choices, but the right museum is the one that meets your particular obsessions. The National Air and Space Museum for anyone who has ever looked up. The National Museum of the American Indian for one of the most architecturally distinctive buildings on the Mall and a collection that reframes the entire American story. Do not feel obligated to follow someone else's itinerary inside a city that gives you this much to choose from.
In the late afternoon, stop for a cocktail at Off the Record, the subterranean bar beneath the Hay-Adams Hotel, one block from the White House. The hotel takes its name from John Hay, who served as personal secretary to Abraham Lincoln and later as Secretary of State under McKinley and Roosevelt, and Henry Adams, historian and descendant of Presidents John Adams and John Quincy Adams. Their side-by-side mansions at 16th and H Streets once hosted Theodore Roosevelt, Mark Twain, Henry James, and the sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens before the hotel was built on their rubble in 1928. Off the Record is in the basement, with political caricatures adorning the walls and a reputation for discretion that Washington insiders have relied on for decades. The hotel's own slogan is "Where nothing is overlooked but the White House." It earns it.
Dinner at Rasika in Penn Quarter, widely considered one of the best Indian restaurants in the United States. The palak chaat alone has been written about in nearly every serious food publication in the country. Reserve well in advance
Skylark Tip: Most visitors walk through the underground concourse between the East and West Buildings of the National Gallery without stopping. Stop. Leo Villareal's Multiverse installation, a tunnel of programmed LED lights that never repeats the same sequence twice, is one of the most underrated art experiences in Washington. Take your time in it. And in the East Building, look up in the atrium before you look at anything else.
Day 5: Arlington National Cemetery, Georgetown & Blues Alley
Begin across the river in Arlington, Virginia, at Arlington National Cemetery. More than 400,000 people are buried in its 639 acres, including veterans from every major American conflict from the Civil War to the present. The land itself has a complicated history: the cemetery was established in 1864 on land confiscated from the family of Confederate General Robert E. Lee following a tax dispute. The Arlington House, Lee's former Greek Revival mansion, still stands above the graves and is open to visitors, one of the more quietly complicated landmarks in a city full of them.
The most visited graves are those of President John F. Kennedy and Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis. Kennedy had admired the hillside location on a previous visit and, after his assassination in November 1963, Jacqueline Kennedy requested that an eternal flame mark his grave, drawing inspiration from the eternal flame at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier at the Arc de Triomphe in Paris. It has burned continuously ever since. Robert F. Kennedy is buried nearby on a simple slope of grass, marked by a white wooden cross and a few lines from his speeches. The simplicity of both graves, against the scale of everything surrounding them, is something you do not forget.
The Tomb of the Unknown Soldier was created in 1921 to house an unidentified soldier killed in World War I, and in later years came to include unknowns from World War II and the Korean War. The Tomb has been guarded continuously since 1937 by the 3rd U.S. Infantry Regiment, known as The Old Guard. The Changing of the Guard is an elaborate ceremony of precise, unhurried movements: the guard marches 21 steps down the black mat behind the Tomb, turns, and executes a sharp shoulder-arms movement to place the weapon on the shoulder closest to visitors, signifying that the Guard stands between the Tomb and any possible threat. Twenty-one was chosen because it symbolizes the highest military honor, the 21-gun salute. In the year of the 250th, there is something particularly appropriate about starting your final day here.
In the afternoon, cross back into Georgetown. Founded in 1751, Georgetown predates Washington, D.C. itself, established 40 years before the District as a Maryland port town. The C&O Canal originates here, a National Park that runs 184.5 miles into Cumberland, Maryland, and brought to life George Washington's vision to open up the country to the west. Walk the towpath, explore the Federal and Georgian row houses on N Street, and wander the independent shops on Wisconsin Avenue. Georgetown is best explored without a map and without a schedule. John and Jackie Kennedy lived here before the White House. There is a self-guided Kennedy walking tour of the neighborhood that traces their time here, from the church where they worshipped to the restaurant booth where he proposed in 1953.
End the trip at Blues Alley, founded in 1965 and located in an 18th-century red brick carriage house in Georgetown. It is America's oldest continuing jazz supper club, and its stage has been graced by Dizzy Gillespie, Sarah Vaughan, Ella Fitzgerald, Wynton Marsalis, and Eva Cassidy, among many others. It is known as "the house that Dizzy built." The room holds 125 people, which means there is no bad seat and no distance between you and the music. It is the right way to end five days in a city that rewards attention.
Skylark Tip: Most visitors to Arlington go directly to the Kennedy graves and the Tomb and leave. Before you do either, walk the older sections of the cemetery — the Civil War graves, the simple white markers stretching in long rows down the hillside toward the Potomac. The scale of it, and the quietness of it, is what the visit is actually about.
Planning Your Trip
Washington rewards advance planning more than almost any other American city. Museum entry is free but timed passes for the most popular institutions fill weeks ahead. Restaurant reservations at minibar and Rasika should be made as far in advance as possible.
Spring, when the cherry blossoms are in bloom around the Tidal Basin in late March and April, and fall from September through November are the best seasons for a Washington D.C. trip. Summer is hot, humid, and crowded. Winter is quieter and the museums are emptier, which has its own advantages.
Washington D.C. is one of the most itinerary-dependent cities in the United States. The more you plan, the more you get.
I arrange bespoke Washington D.C. itineraries, hotel recommendations at preferred partner properties, restaurant reservations, museum passes, and private transfers, so nothing is left to chance in a city that rewards advance preparation. Reach out at kacey.rose@fora.travel to begin planning your Washington D.C. trip.
Comments