Our last day in Washington had a different feel to it. After a week of monuments and museums and big marble buildings, we spent some time in the Georgetown neighborhood for a slower kind of day on foot. We left Juneaux back at Cherry Hill Park for this one. It was hot, and most of the places we wanted to duck into would not have let her past the door anyway, so she pulled guard duty at the rig while we drove in and found parking down in Georgetown.
The canal that runs through town
One of the things that pulled us in is the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal National Historical Park, the C&O, running right through the middle of Georgetown. It is a unit of the National Park Service, the bottom end of a waterway that once ran 184 miles up to Cumberland, Maryland, hauling coal and grain and lumber back when the river itself was too rocky to traverse. You can still see the whole story in what is left: the stone locks, the lock houses, the old industrial bones of a working canal tucked in between the brick buildings.
When we walked it, though, the canal bed was bone dry and mostly grown over with weeds. The Georgetown stretch has been in the middle of a major restoration, a multimillion dollar Park Service project to repair the historic locks and walls and add some flood protection, and they drained it to do the work. The canal boat rides that used to run this section were paused for it, with the plan to bring them back once the work wraps. So what we saw was not neglect. It was a job in progress.
The towpath and the walk that ties it together
Running right alongside the canal is the towpath. Back in the working days this was the path the mules walked, plodding along and towing the loaded boats through the still water by rope. There was no engine on those boats. The whole operation moved at the speed of a mule. Today the towpath is one of the best walking and biking trails you will find in a city, a flat ribbon of crushed stone and dirt that you can follow for miles out of town if you have the legs for it.
For us it was the thread that tied the whole day together. You can walk the towpath and the streets that cross it and hit just about everything we wanted to see without ever moving the truck.
Georgetown itself
And Georgetown is a fine place to just walk. Down by the river there is Washington Harbor, a big open waterfront plaza with the boats and the water on one side and restaurants stacked up on the other. Up from there the streets climb away from the water, and they are packed. It felt like a whole downtown folded into a few blocks, stores lining the main streets and then more of them spilling down every side street you passed.
Lunch at Clyde's, and a steak waiting at camp
We stopped for lunch at Clyde's, a Georgetown institution that has been on M Street since 1963. The man who opened it, Stuart Davidson, built it on the idea that it is more fun to eat in a saloon than to drink in a restaurant, and the place has been a fixture here ever since. It has one more odd claim to fame. Back in the seventies the bar ran a little happy hour menu it called "Afternoon Delights," spiced shrimp and hot brie and the like, and a local songwriter named Bill Danoff spotted that menu card on the table and walked off with the title for a song. That song, "Afternoon Delight," went all the way to number one in 1976. So the next time that tune gets stuck in your head, you can thank a Georgetown appetizer menu.
I had some great oysters and a crab cake, while Donna had the filet. The history was better than the meal, I am sorry to report. The food itself was very good, but the service was slow, the portions were small, and I walked out the door still hungry. But, fear not. I had a big steak wating on me at the camper to finish the job Clyde's started. Good story, light lunch.
The Old Stone House
A little further along we stopped in at the Old Stone House, another Park Service site sitting right there on M Street among all the shops. We went inside and walked through it. It does not look like much next to the storefronts around it, but it is the oldest building in Washington still standing on its original foundation, built way back in 1765, before there was even a country to put a capital in. The funny part is why it survived. Somewhere along the way locals got it in their heads that George Washington had used the house, and they protected it on the strength of that story. He never did. They saved the wrong building for the right reasons, and because of that mix-up the last pre-Revolutionary colonial house in the city is still standing while everything around it got torn down and built over.
Seventy-five steps
We could not leave Georgetown without going to find the Exorcist stairs. If you have seen the movie you know exactly which stairs I mean, and if you have not, they are a steep run of stone steps wedged into a narrow gap between
buildings, made famous by one very memorable scene. I counted the steps on the way up. Seventy-five of them, and they are no joke. Going up wasn’t fun. Coming back down was almost worse, because they are so steep that looking down the whole flight makes you reach for the rail.
One week was never going to be enough
And then we were out of day, and out of trip. This was our last one in DC, and looking back it really hit me how much we never got to. A week sounds like plenty until you are staring at a city that could fill a month and still leave you wanting. We drove home with a long list of the things we ran past or ran out of time for, the kind of list that all but guarantees we will be back. That list is its own story, and it is the one we will tell next.
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