A New Year in DC

I love spontaneous vacations. Sometime over the holidays, while it seemed everyone else was fighting the flu bug, I got bit by the more seductive travel bug. So while my friends were procuring antibiotics from Canada on the Internet, I paid an online visit to my friend William Shatner...and booked a last minute trip to Washington DC. Yes, we had to spend our "New Year's Rockin Eve" doing laundry with Dick Clark, but we were able to welcome the first day of 2009 in our Nation's Capitol.

I had never been to DC before, and I don't know if the residents were so warm in friendly because of the big 'going-away' party they have planned for Mr. Bush in a couple weeks, or if they are always so nice and accommodating. We absolutely loved the city. DC has the East-Coast sophistication of NYC, with the warm hospitality of the South. It's clean and charming, and there is more history per square mile than in any other city in America.

We made it to about 10 museums in 3 days. The most interesting exhibits for Gio were Daniel's Story at the Holocaust Museum and seeing Thomas Edison's first light bulbs at the Museum of American History. He also dug the Spy Museum...but mostly the giftshop. Personally, that's my favorite part of any museum.

Now when your travel companion is a 9 year old, fine dining is usually nothing fancier than Ruby Tuesday's (where, in fact I watched my finicky eater polish off a full rack of baby back ribs). But we did discover a gem of an eatery (albeit a very crowded, run-down hole-in-the-wall lunch counter). Lincoln's Waffle House became our daily grazing ground. Not only was their bacon cooked to crispy pink perfection, but their waffles were oozing with butter, yet golden and crunchy on the outside. You'll get a veritable UN representation of ethnicities in here, and the warm hospitable nature of the Asian proprietors was downright charming---bringing tourists and locals together over a blue-plate special. I'd move to DC just to become a regular at this place.