The next time you crack your backdoor to let your cat outside for its daily adventure, you may want to think again. For a cat, the outdoors is filled with undesirable potential. Like the risks of catching and transmitting diseases, and the uncontrollable drive to hunt and kill wildlife, which has been shown to reduce native animal populations and degrade biodiversity.

So starts a University of Maryland press release about this paper, which analyzes interactions between domestic cats and “eight native mammal species common in urban areas” in Washington D.C.

Now, if you ever stepped foot in D.C. you will notice that the most abundant mammals are neither cats, dogs, nor humans, but rats. But these District mascots do not make an appearance among the species analyzed, which were eastern chipmunk, eastern cottontail, eastern gray squirrel, groundhog, white-footed mouse, raccoon, red fox, and Virginia opossum.

Ah yes, the red fox. So very common in Washington D.C.

Look, I don’t doubt that domestic cats roaming around the suburbs are the scourge of bunny rabbits and chipmunks. But downtown D.C. has a bit of a rat problem and this study could have been a way to learn more about them.

An homage to M.C. Escher’s Three Worlds, shot at he US National Arboretum, which is another one of the spots in DC you shouldn’t miss.

• Avoid, if at all possible, eating in a random downtown restaurant. This is especially true for the National Mall, but also near large hotels — Woodley Park with nearby Omni Shoreham and the Marriott comes to mind. There is a line of restaurants there which sound suspiciously like some other, more well known DC establishments: Mayahuel for Oyamel, District Kitchen for District Commons, that kind of thing.
• There is good food to be had, for sure, but it is still overpriced.
• The best food at any price is outside of the beltway, usually in strip malls.
• Yes, sometimes you need to pay for the “good” attractions, but not in DC! The best stuff is free and unless you want to go to a specific gallery or museum (The Phillips collection is worth visiting) you can easily spend a week just going through the Smithsonian museums and free parks.
• Speaking of parks: Kennilworth Aquatic Gardens and Brookside Gardens are two (free) family favorites, and underrated.
• Two favorites that you do have to pay for: the Hillwood estate, which was Marjorie Merriweather-Post’s home and now an exhibit of (mostly pre-revolutionary Russian, including Faberge eggs) art with a small-ish but beautiful garden; and the Dumbarton Oaks museum and garden, which is so large that is bordering on unseemly considering its Georgetown location.
• But the best — and free — experience would be just to walk around areas that aren’t the Mall, around Dupont and Logan Circles on a spring afternoon when trees are in blossom, or down U Street/Shaw on a Friday evening, both unforgettable experiences in their own ways.

And most times, it is! It doesn’t take an advanced degree in hospitality studies to figure out that most things in the family vacation gauntlet that is Pigeon Forge, Tennesse ⊕ For the uninitiated, Pigeon Forge is the closest neighbor of Gatlinburg, the gateway to the Smokey Mountains. This website helpfully lists all the “attractions” available to those who would rather not hike, most of which line both sides of the highway you need to take to get to the Smokies. It is — especially to my European eyes — quite the sight. are, indeed, tourist traps — empty flashes of light and puffs of smoke meant to relieve you of some expendable income.

But in that most lies the trouble. For a decade now we’ve driven past a gigantic banner in the Shenandoah valley advertising the Luray caverns as if they were the eight Wonder of the World. And for a decade or so I avoided going because it was clearly a tourist trap. Only, it clearly wasn’t.

So I’ll tell you a secret: we did end up going to one of the “attractions” in Pigeon Forge that’s a mini-resort of it’s own call The Island and that too was charming in a fake lego-land sort of way. Dollywood is there too, and we will go some time soon.

Between everything that’s within walking distance in D.C. and driving distance up and down the East Cost — being loose with the definition of the coast as I will count the Smokies in there too — even if 99% of attractions are pure tourist traps, the 1% can fill a lifetime.

Two caveat: first, maybe your Tourist Trap Radar is better calibrated than my own, as my frugal-by-necessity parents instilled in me the sense that anything that charges money is a tourist trap. We saw many a historic landmark — from the outside, of course — in my childhood.

Second, it may occasionally happen that you pay for something and then, as you step through the entrance, get a sinking feeling that there is no there there and that the place is indeed a tourist trap. But so what! You can’t be a good surgeon unless you’ve occasionally taken out a healthy appendix, and you can’t be sure you’ve seen everything that’s good unless you’ve occasionally visited a clunker.

I sense this advice applies to more than just general surgery and vacationing.

Still standing! And even more impressive in person.

The “new” museum, 3 years old now, is also wonderful and worth a repeat visit to Liberty Island.

The Wizards’ new cherry blossom styling is quite fitting for DC, and even more pink than this photo conveys.

This was, in fact, a trick question. They are all stalactites, the ones at the bottom being a mirror image reflected in a perfectly still shallow pond.

Caves are fascinating.

Which ones are stalactites and which are stalagmites?