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

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

Product Type: Book

Product Price: $16.99

Manufacturer: Frommers

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Reviews

Rating: 5 / 5
Date: 2010-05-21
Summary: "The Unofficial Guide to Washington, DC"

We are going to Washington, DC in October and this book will defininately help keep us out of trouble with traffic, transportation and getting around the area to see what we really want to see. There is a lot of specific information on the different regions of Washington, DC...someone really did their homework.

Rating: 2 / 5
Date: 2010-03-18
Summary: "Not my favorite Unofficial Guide or D.C travel resource"

Though a frequent visitor to the Northern Virginia/D.C. area, I read this book in preparation for a more in-depth visit to the National Mall and some of the newer attractions. I'm a huge fan of the Unofficial Guides, and always use them as my primary reference for trips. In fact, I've found some of my favorite foreign hotels, attractions, and restaurants in their insightful pages. However, I was surprisingly disappointed with the Unofficial Guide to Washington, D.C. I felt the writing lacked the usual cheeky, offbeat spark I love in this series, and sounded more like the drier, more traditional guidebooks I usually avoid.

As a resident of a large city, I was also a bit taken aback by the author's emphasis throughout the book on the threat of crime and her suggestions for dealing with the homeless. (I particularly question her well-meant, but naive and ultimately harmful suggestion to keep a few dollar bills in your pockets to hand out to homeless people. Generally citizens are urged to politely decline and to donate their money to an organization that will help get the homeless off the street, rather than perpetuating their situation by giving them loose change.) While visiting any big city requires vigilance, I felt the author's warnings against crime were overblown and began to sound a bit paranoid (coming from someone who has lived in the heart of both NYC and Philadelphia). Because the author repeated these misconceptions over and over, it made me question her authority and judgment in the other areas. In a more minor point, I also felt the section on buying a Metro ticket was a bit overly detailed (around 5 pages, including step-by-step photos) and actually made the process more difficult to understand.

I did find the chapter on attractions to be quite helpful, with great ratings, descriptions, and insider tips, and it seemed to be more within the tone of the series. Though I did not need the hotel and restaurant sections, I can see from a glance that the former is too light on detail, and the latter is too dense with information to be helpful.

BOTTOM LINE: I would recommend you check this book out of the library for the attractions chapter, and possibly as a secondary resource to double check restaurant reviews, but not rely on it as your only source for general city information or hotels.

Rating: 4 / 5
Date: 2010-01-30
Summary: "great guide for planning"

The Unofficial Guide was a great resource for planning our trip to DC. The attraction and restaurant profiles were invaluable for prioritizing and planning our limited time. There were a few errors, but every travel guide has some - things change.

We took this guide and Fodor's on our trip - Fodor's came in more handy once we were at the sights, but The Unofficial Guide was a better planning tool. I recommend both.

Rating: 4 / 5
Date: 2009-12-05
Summary: "Great except for the food and restaurant suggestions"

For the most part, I found this guidebook terrific. The good parts include:

-Very detailed and frank descriptions of the attractions (museums and monuments). I found the information accurate and thorough, including the info about who would best love each site, and which parts of the museums were best if you had limited time to visit them. Saying which Metro stations were closest to each attraction was a nice touch, as was the information about how to use the Metro, and the Metro maps. The map of the Mall with the locations of each museum was good, too, although it would have been much easier to use if it were at the front of the book instead of buried in the middle. Trying to flip back and forth through the book was a bit frustrating.

-It's not padded with color photographs you don't really need.

-The information doesn't read like advertising/PR for each site. It's clear the team of reviewers actually visited every place listed and evaluated it honestly. These evaluations and description were more than worth the price of this guide. I paged through other guidebooks, and this was the most useful and practical of them all, and the only one I bought and brought with me.

The bad/mediocre:

- The food and restaurant recommendations were way off the mark. We got shut out of the cafes at the National Gallery of Art and the Sculpture Garden Pavilion because the book didn't mention that they closed earlier than the museums in which they were located. The food court at the Old Post Office Pavilion was depressing and unhygienic (my friend had to tell the guy at the Middle Eastern station to use gloves, and he grumbled about it), and the food was gross. The guidebook's idea of what constituted affordable food was laughable. I would have appreciated more listings for cheaper restaurants; its idea of a moderate price was somewhere in the $30-60 for an entree range. There was also no info about which museum/Mall area cafes and food courts would be best if you wanted to avoid swarms of children.

- The phone number for the monuments at night tour was wrong. There were a few recs for hop-on-hop-off buses that included a tour guide, but no recs for the type that simply goes around the tourist sites without a guide (i.e., less time-consuming and costly, and doesn't skip a bunch of sites by rolling right past stuff you want to see en route to places you might not want to visit; we saw buses to that effect when we got there, but there was no info reviewing them in this guide).

- As mentioned above, the maps included were great, but placed in inconvenient places in the guide. There was no big map of the whole city, which would have been nice, and there was no Circulator route map (this is a hop-on-hop-off service meeting the above requirements). Our hotel had Circulator maps, so we were fine, but they should have been included in the guidebook.

- The neighborhood descriptions were pretty wimpy and short. The descriptions of stores and restaurants in each area were in separate sections of the book instead of listed within or right after the neighborhood descriptions.

Despite those drawbacks, this is definitely way better than the other guidebooks out there, especially if your trip will focus on the attractions along the National Mall.

Rating: 5 / 5
Date: 2009-09-25
Summary: "Great how-to guide for first-time visitors!"

This is a great guide for first-time visitors to Washington DC. It gives advice for the best times of year to visit DC (considering weather and crowd levels), how to get around and use the Metro (without assuming previous knowledge of subway systems), when to visit the sites to avoid waiting in line, and which sites will appeal to different ages and interests. It also provides recommendations for hotels and restaurants, but its main strength, in my opinion, is making a new traveler feel comfortable touring the area confidently using public transportation and planning which sites to visit their first time in DC. Highly recommended!