Travel to Washington Dc

The Unofficial Guide to Washington, D.C. (Unofficial Guides)

Format: Paperback
Author: Joe Surkiewicz
ReleaseDate: 18 February, 2005
Publisher: Wiley
Rating:

Ehh, I took it, I used it, I found the errors

(1) Information on the Mount Vernon tours was wrong. The errors in this guidebook, let me count them. The departure times for the two touring companies were mixed up. (It's a good thing I thought to call ahead!)
(2) The phone number given for the National Archives was no longer in operation.
(3) Yes, it's true the subway doesn't go to Georgetown, but as of 2006, D. C. offers a bus line, The Circulator, that does.
(4) The Smithsonian National Museum of American History had already begun a staggered closing of many of its exhibits for a 2007 building renovation, something this guidebook never mentioned. (Thanks NMAH web site!)
I bought this title particularly because it was published in 2005 & it was the most up-to-date, well-reviewed title I could find, but I found a handful of time-wasting errors in it over a span of four days.
Being a first time visitor to Washington D. C. I would have appreciated a guidebook that had color photographs of buildings, monuments, & major art works, but except for the front cover this book has no photos. As for the book layout, I appreciated the subway & D. C. maps on the inside front & back cover, but I had a hard time finding sections of the book without laboriously using the index. This is not a guidebook to be looking through while you're on the go. The restaurant listings also seemed unnecessarily limited. I didn't spend much time sightseeing because I was attending a convention, or I, no doubt, would have encountered more inaccurate information.
After thumbing through several guidebooks before my visit, I would recommend the DK (Dorling Kindersley) Eyewitness or Top 10 glossy photographic guidebooks. You can probably find sites with hotel ratings & information just as easily on the web. And you can always look up phone numbers & addresses for attractions in your hotel's yellow pages, which you may have to do anyway with this book. I wanted to purchase a guidebook that was text-heavy, but that also increases the odds that some of the information will be wrong.
If you e-mail your U. S. Senator or Representative or visit the D. C. tourism website, they will send you free guidebooks with a Calendar of Events & descriptions of tourist attractions that are as helpful as what you will find in this book &, in my experience, more up-to-date. Three-and-a-half out of five stars for this guidebook. Wasted time is wasted money.

Necessary to have before going to DC
I purchased this one after reading the reviews and reading the sample pages. I looked at a number of books dedicated to providing advice for travel to Washington DC. And I was not disappointed. I found the information here to be very accurate and readable. It provided the basic facts needed to plan a good trip. We spent a total of 5 days in DC, and though I've been there twice before, I relied on the advice from these authors. Never once was I disappointed. If I ever spend as much time in another city that the authors have researched, I will not hesitate to purchase that book as well. Too many first-time tourists whom we met during our time in DC did not have a good idea of what they were doing, and I believe they probably ended up wasting a lot of valuable time in a city that is chock-full of things to do. Several times I was able to make a quick decision in just a couple of minutes by looking the information up by using the handy index.

I do want to mention an earlier review of this book where the reviewer said that the book itself was too big to bring along. That's ridiculous. The book is not much bigger than a paperback and fits quite nicely in a backpack. My advice: Bring this book along with you while traveling around DC and you won't regret it. .

Guaranteed to improve your visit to D.C.
A gold-mine of tips for touring the places that are hard to get into in the post-9/11 era. Like the other Unofficial Guides we've used, this book paid for itself with the first piece of advice we looked up! After that, I scanned cover-to-cover, and by the end of the book we had a great sense of which attractions we wanted to visit and how to go about arranging our days. It's also packed with information on neat things to see and do off the beaten path. You can't go wrong with this one!.

Related products:
click image or link for details on these Washington Dc travel books.

	Frommer's Washington, D.C. 2006 (Frommer's Complete)
	Fodor's Around Washington, D.C. with Kids (Around the City with Kids)