Welcome!

I've been wanting to do a blog like this since I moved to the DC area almost 2 1/2 years ago, but could never really get up the motivation to begin. When I was a concierge working at a luxury hotel downtown, I thought how wonderful it would be to explore my amazing new city and report my wanderings on a blog devoted to the cause. Sadly, in the hospitality industry, time is a premium commodity. While working 12-hour shifts for 9 days in a row on a regular basis, I soon came to realize that I barely had enough time to eat and (occasionally) do my laundry, so my dreams of actually exploring the city, much less writing about it, fell to the wayside.

After about 7 months at my concierge job, I was lucky enough to get a regular 9-5 position at a trade association. Suddenly, I had plenty of time to explore...but while I wrote about a few of my adventures in an online journal for my friends, I was still unmotivated to blog about it.

Then it happened: I met The Guy-- you know, the one that not only loved the fact that I wanted to play tourist in my own city, but who wanted to join me as well. We were a perfect match: our first date was a tour of Mount Vernon, and it was off to the races from there. We made a list--a huge list--of everything we hadn't yet seen but desperately wanted to, and began to work our way through it. We went to the American History Museum, Caucus Room, Embassy of Canada, Round Robin Bar, the National Arboretum , the new-and-improved Silver Spring, and on and on.

And then, for whatever reason, it stalled. Shortly after that, we broke up. I later discovered he had been seeing another girl while we were dating and had left me for her.

After suffering a massive broken heart from that news, I realized I have been spending entirely too much time in my 489 sq. ft. studio apartment. Don't get me wrong - it's a nice apartment, in a nice building, in a nice neighborhood. But it also allows for entirely too much introspection, and I recently realized if I stayed in every night and watched movies and re-runs of The West Wing, I was going to go out of my mind. Not cool.

Out I go, then, to fill up my schedule with free (or mostly free...or at least pretty cheap) adventure-- and this time, I'm actually going to write about it! Because pictures are fun, I'll try to include them where I can, I promise. Also, I'm still working out the format, so please bear with me!

Stay tuned...