Discover America USA Travel Guide

Capital Region

Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, Washington, D.C., and West Virginia.

Washington, D.C. www.washington.org (Douglas Litchfield/Shutterstock)

An inland sea full of sailboats and shellfish, sandy stretches of Atlantic shoreline, country roads and mountain getaways, Civil War battlefields and enough museums and monuments to keep art aficionados and history buffs satisfied for months. This is the Capital Region.

In the midsection of the East Coast sits the U.S. capital, stately Washington D.C. It’s especially beautiful in the spring, during cherry blossom season. The city’s cherry trees were a gift from the Japanese people in 1912. Surrounding this power-driven city is an abundance of natural glories: the mountains, forests and rivers of Virginia and West Virginia, and the beaches of Virginia, Maryland and Delaware. There are quaint fishing villages on the coast, bucolic mountain towns born when the railroads where first built and, here and there, large cities with rich histories. There are surprises around every curve in the road — and the roads are very, very curvy.

The pride of a nation is reflected in the massive buildings of Washington, D.C. The Capitol and the White House are both free to tour. And be sure to visit the Smithsonian Institution, a collection of nineteen museums, including the National Zoo, National Portrait Museum, National Postal Museum and National Air and Space Museum, a favorite with children because of its huge displays of aviation devices, from the earliest flying machines to space capsules.

On the National Mall, a large park in the District’s downtown, you can visit the 555-foot-tall obelisk that stands as a monument to President Washington and the Lincoln Memorial, with its inscriptions, murals and President Lincoln immortalized in marble. Memorials to the veterans of both World War II and the Vietnam War are also impressive and moving. Away from the Mall in West Potomac Park, the Jefferson Memorial is a neo-classical dome that resembles Rome’s Pantheon.

North and east of the nation’s capital is Maryland, where you can feast on some of the most delicious crabs you’ll ever find. In Baltimore, visit the brick row house where baseball legend Babe Ruth was born and tour the home where Edgar Allan Poe lived and wrote his tales of terror.

In Annapolis, which still has the brick streets that were laid down in its colonial days, tour the campus of the U.S. Naval Academy and indulge in the area’s favorite pastime by sailing on Chesapeake Bay. Then leave the city behind and cross the Bay Bridge to the Eastern Shore of Maryland, where you can see gunslinger Annie Oakley’s retirement home in Cambridge or book a fishing trip at Ocean City.

Adjacent to Maryland’s northeastern corner is the small state of Delaware. In the capital city of Dover, outdoors at “The Green,” you can see the spot where elected representatives from the state’s three counties ratified the U.S. Constitution in 1787, becoming the first state to do so. There are numerous historic buildings in Dover, some colonial and others Victorian. The Biggs Museum of American Art is known for its collection of paintings and furniture.

Farther north, in Delaware City, board a ferry on the Delaware River for the half-mile ride to Pea Patch Island. There, you can tour Fort Delaware, where confederate prisoners were kept during the U.S. War Between the States, also known as the Civil War. If you’re in the mood for a beach visit, the seaside resorts of Lewes, Rehoboth Beach or less populated Fenwich Island beckon.

Wilmington, Delaware is a lovely city of colonial homes and elaborate gardens. It has two excellent art museums — the Delaware Art Museum and the Delaware Center for the Contemporary Arts. Outside of town, visit Winterthur, the vast and elaborate country estate of antiques collector and horticulturist Henry Francis du Pont. After you tour the house, stroll through its gardens; there are some sixty acres of them, including an “enchanted” fairy tale garden just for children.

Below diminutive Delaware sits Virginia, home to Jamestown, the nation’s first permanent English settlement, founded in 1607. A visit here includes a film on the roots of the nation and exhibitions on colonial culture and the interactions of settlers with the Native Americans. You can also try on armor in a colonial fort, or grind corn as a Native American would have done.

Not far away is Yorktown Battlefield, where America’s decisive battle for independence was won. This is where, on October 19, 1781, British forces under Lord Charles Cornwallis surrendered to American and French armies led by General George Washington.

Further west, just off Interstate 81 near Lexington, visit Natural Bridge, a 215- foot-tall span of stone. There are caverns nearby and also some newer, manmade attractions, including Foamhenge, a re-creation in styrofoam of England’s Stonehenge.

Then drive part of the scenic Blue Ridge Parkway, which winds 469 miles down the Virginia spine of the Blue Ridge Mountains — the eastern range of the Appalachians — into North Carolina. In summer, seen from afar, the mountains really do look blue.

Of course, if it’s mountains you want, West Virginia, at the southwest corner of Virginia, has plenty of them: The entire state is within the Appalachian Mountain range. West Virginia rightly claims itself to be “wild and wonderful,” celebrating the fact that its heavily forested mountains largely remain wilderness. It’s a paradise for hikers and mountain bikers — and, for that matter, tourists in cars. One of the prettiest drives is the 45-mile Canaan
Valley Loop through the Monongahela National Forest in the eastern part of the state.

Winding through the mountains are the New River and Gauley River, where white-water rafting is popular. When water is released from an upstream lake dam, the Upper Gauley has Class V Rapids. Want to base your water recreation activities in a quintessential West Virginia town? Try Hinton, a late nineteenth-century railroad town in the southern part of the state where three rivers converge.

West Virginia is also known for its glassmaking. Hundreds of businesses make hand-blown glass. A favorite to tour is Blenko Glass in Milton, where you can watch the glass-blowers turn blobs of molten glass into colorful creations.

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