• 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?

This wishing well in the Luray Caverns must be the most American thing I’ve seen yet. Nature: check. Money: check. Altrusim: check-check (all the money is donated). Note — the water is clear, but the stones underneath are green from oxidized penny-derived copper.

Ka-ching.

• If anyone ever tells me again that America is stagnating and points to China’s skyscraper forests that sprang out of nowhere, I’ll point them to Nashville. More cranes there than at a crane festival.
• Ditto for the line about American cities being more and more alike, so that it doesn’t matter whether one lives in the suburbs of Albuquerque or Atlanta. Take a walk up and down Broadway at 1pm on a Monday, count the number of live music venues packed side to side, and tell me of any other place in the country that has the same number per meter squared.
• Corollary to the above: if you can’t stand the smell of stale beer, probably best to stay out of downtown.
• There was a time between Vanderbilt University being founded and Grand Ole Opry exploding in popularity when the city was known as the Athens of the South. This was even before they built a full-scale replica of the Parthenon on the city’s centennial, in 1897. ⊕ The one from 1897 was made of plaster and torn down shortly after the World Fair it was built for. The more permanent one still standing is itself 100 years old now, being built in 1920. So yes, the Parthenon was so nice they built it twice. They were an industrious bunch.
• Speaking of engineering feats: North America’s largest non-casino hotel & resort is in Nashville, ready to give you that indoor river cruise experience you could otherwise get only in Vegas.
• Six bullet points in, and only now do we get to food? Well, it’s good! Much better food and service dollar-for-dollar than anything you will get inside the D.C. beltway at either end of the pricing spectrum. Hot chicken and banana pudding are favorites, though for full transparency I should add that none of puddings we had came close to the one from Bernard’s in Roanoke, VA.
• Some good murals as well.
• “Sarah Cannon Research Institute (SCRI) is a research organization focusing on therapies for patients which include drugs that are in development. With corporate headquarters in Nashville, Tennessee, United States, it conducts community-based clinical trials in oncology, cardiology, gastroenterology, and other therapeutic areas.”
• We would pack our bags and move tomorrow if the summers weren’t as humid as D.C.’s. Also, catastrophic flood from as recently as 10 years ago would make me think twice. But it’s on the list!

Downtown Nashville TN, October 15 2022, 1:15pm CT.

Madam’s Organ/Adams Morgan, Washington DC, October 14 2022, 8:30am EST.