Our bike tour with Jeff was the absolute highlight of our family visit to Washington, DC. All of us – parents and kids (10, 8, 6) agreed that this was the best part of our trip by far – and that’s in competition with the other ‘must-dos’ - tours of the White House, Capitol, Archives, Washington Monument, museums…. Doing the monuments on bike allows you to see so much in a short time – it’s just a quick ride between the monuments, but I know that if we had walked, there would have been a lot of complaining from the little ones about their legs…With this tour, they didn’t get tired at all (even going past our original 3 hours!), and absolutely loved the fun and freedom of being on bikes!
I was a bit nervous before the tour about the kids being able to handle the intersections and dealing with cars (they had never biked in a city before) but Jeff had us totally at ease throughout the entire journey, and the crosswalks and traffic weren’t an issue at all. The 6 year old is still a little wobbly on wheels and can’t pedal as fast as the others, so we opted for him to ride the trailer-cycle attached to Jeff’s bike – which was perfect: he still felt he was part of the biking action, and we had less to worry about.
I know it’s vacation, but I highly recommend getting up early for this – we opted for a 7 am start and had half of the monuments all to ourselves, which was truly amazing. Even by the time some of them started to have more people, they were by no means ‘crowded’; and it certainly helped to bike the paths with fewer pedestrians to maneuver around.
Jeff started off our tour by orienting us with a city map so we understood the layout of the city and where we would be traveling. And his bits of history, symbolism at the memorials, and storytelling were just the right amount – we learned so much, and the kids now have nuggets they will remember about each of the sites we saw. Our final stop of our trip was the top of the Washington Monument – which was a great cap off, as we looked down and were able to really absorb how much distance we had covered on our bikes!
If you are a family with kids, I highly highly recommend Jeff’s bike tour – it will allow you to hit all the big sites in DC, without their legs wearing out!! And it was simply just so much fun! We will be talking about this one for a long time – and have all of the photos Jeff took to help remember it by, too!