My next stop on my Northwest DC march was Dumbarton Oaks, a large mansion in Georgetown that was the home of the Bliss family in the early 20^th century. The mansion is not currently open to the public, but the 54 acre garden that surrounds it, designed by Beatrix Ferrand, is open to the public and has made National Geographic's list of the top 10 gardens to see in world. Dumbarton is unique for having numerous small "garden rooms", each one with a different theme. A small museum of the family’s art collection is also open and consists mostly of Byzantine art from the eastern Mediterranean and pre-Columbian art from Central and South America as well as a rare book library.

Although I spent a lot of time in the Georgetown neighborhood on visits to DC while I was in college, when I lived in the Washington area after college, and even lived in house in Georgetown for about a month one summer while I was doing College Republican kiddy politics internship, I had never made it the few blocks farther to the campus of Georgetown University, the oldest Catholic university in the country . Georgetown has some well-known attractive buildings around the quad at its entrance, but it’s an essentially a dense urban campus that has built up most of its land with newer modern buildings and taken over most of the buildings in several neighborhood blocks. On the whole it was not as physically impressive a campus as I had envisioned.

I also managed to stumble across the famous “Exorcist Steps” and walk down them to M Street. I found no need to join the annoying tourists reenacting the scene from “The Exorcist” where the priest falls down the stairs to his death and tried not to trip over them. The steps are not difficult to find just west of the Key Bridge on M Street. I had sometimes wondered where they were.

Overall Georgetown doesn’t impress me the way it once did. The posh residential streets are nice but the commercial district around M Street is overly crowded and too full of tourists and the stores, bars, and restaurants that cater to that collegiate and tourist crowd. I’m over that kind of party central atmosphere. I guess I must be getting old.