The DC Traveler

Now that the holiday shopping season is officially underway, finding a great gift for someone can be challenging. But how about giving a Washington, DC travel guide?
To make it easy to find a great one, I just completed reviewing three leading Washington, DC travel guides including: 

Fodor’s Washington, DC 2008, 382 pages, $17.95
Pauleen Frommer’s Washington, DC, 310 pages, $16.95
Lonely Planet Washington, DC, 288 pages , $17.99 

To give you an idea of how I reviewed these guides, I compared the guides over a month, using them in side-by-side comparisons of attractions, destinations, hotels, restaurant and more to determine the “best”.  I judged them in the followings …read more

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It was a chilly 37° and the sun wouldn’t rise for another two hours. The 10 mph wind out of the northwest made it feel like just below freezing.
But there were bargains to be had. Serious bargains. Big enough to cause even the most of rational of people to stand outside for hours, braving the cold and wind, all in the hopes of scooping up a few choice Black Friday holiday bargains.

Something in the Thanksgiving day edition of the Washington Post caught my eye.   It wasn’t the latest news story out of the Middle East, nor another claim of …read more

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It’s time for DC’s annual pre-holiday sales tax exemption starting today, Friday, November 23rd and running through Sunday, December 2nd. 
The exemption applies to every item of clothing, shoes or accessories priced under $100 per item and exemption eliminates the 5.75% DC sales tax. 
“Accessories” include jewelry, watches, purses, scarves, gloves, sunglasses, umbrellas, ties, hats, belts and other traditional accessory items, but probably not the Prada bag shown below.  
 
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The post-harvest celebration of food, feasting, and praising God held by the American Pilgrims colonists first occurred in October 1621 and was not called Thanksgiving. It was a combined solemn ceremony consisting of a full day of prayer, worship and thanks to God and a couple days of entertaining the Indians who taught the Pilgrims to catch eel and grow corn, who probably would have perished without their help.
More than three hundred years later, President Franklin Roosevelt set the fourth Thursday of November as the official date for Thanksgiving in the U.S.
I hope you enjoy some turkey with all the trimmings …read more

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Trained in the haute école, or high school of classical dressage, the internationally acclaimed Lipizzaner Stallions are the prima ballerinas of the horse world.
The 12 to 14 performing Lipizzan stallions execute their signature “airs above the ground” or extreme jumps and hops, originally used by riders as a defensive battle maneuver.   Combined with intricate prancing and marching, the horses put on a spectacular “dance”.
The all white Lipizzan breed were first bred when Austrian Archduke Karl created a royal horse stud farm in 1580 in Lipizzan, Austria. Breeding powerful Spanish horses for royalty, over the next couple centuries, other powerful horse breeds …read more

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One word says it all — Watergate. 
It triggers the memories of some of the lowest points in American politics and the Oval Office. 
The burglary of Daniel Ellsberg’s psychiatrist’s office; the bugging of DNC headquarters; the arrest of five men at Watergate; the attempted cover-up; Woodward and Bernstein; the “plumbers”; Deep Throat; G. Gordon Liddy; a little old country lawyer named Sam Erwin; Nixon campaign checks; White House subpoenas; “I am not a crook”; Halderman, Ehrlichman, Mitchell and Dean; White House Oval Office tapes; 18 missing minutes; the Supreme Court decision - United States v. Nixon; and almost three years after the initial break-in, a Presidential resignation.

And …read more

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These photos were recently taken about an hour west of Washington, DC, at Manassas Battlefield Park in Manassas, Virginia, the site of the first Battle of Manassas in 1861 during the Civil War. Also called the first Battle of Bull Run. A year later, a second battle on the same site occurred.  Over 80,000 soldiers from both sides died between the two battles.

 
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The Lone Sailor statute mans his watch on the “Granite Sea” covered by a map of the globe on Memorial Plaza at the United States Navy Memorial.
Memorial Plaza also incorporates ship’s masts with signal flags, fountain pools and waterfalls as an honor to the 340,000 active men and women of the United States Navy, as well as Navy personnel dating back to the Revolutionary War.
The plans for a Navy Memorial in Washington, DC date back to the days of DC architect Pierre L’Enfant. But it took years to finally develop one. The Navy plaza opened in 1991, after 14 years if planning, …read more

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With the Presidential election heating up, it’s sad that only 60% of registered voters actually cast a ballot in Presidential elections.  Women voters outnumbered men voters for the first time in a Presidential election in 1984 (Reagan-Mondale).
American women, up until a couple generations ago, had to fight to get the right to vote.  The 19th Amendment, which was ratified in 1920, finally granted women the right to vote.
But the road to winning the right to vote was a tough 70 year struggle. American suffragettes organized and formed several women’s rights groups to push the passing of legislation that would give women …read more

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Remember my posts about Judge Roy “frivolous lawsuit” Pearson? The now infamous DC Administrative Judge that filed a $76 million law suit against a DC dry cleaners for losing his pants?  Well, he lost more than just his pants.
After the pants in question came up missing when he tried to pick them up at the dry cleaners, he filed a lawsuit for $1,000 to cover the cost of the lost pants, which were half of a business suit. At one point, the cleaners later found a pair of pants that they claimed were Pearson’s missing pair, but the judge asserted …read more

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