When you are traveling with someone without a lot of mobility, a Hop On Hop Off bus tour is the best way to give them an overview of a place. So I took my visiting sister-in-law on a Big Bus Tour of Washington, DC, on Christmas Eve. The tour is definitely overpriced at about $45 a person, but she loved it, and we had a birds-eye view of Washington’s most iconic buildings and monuments from the upper level. She loved it!
Big BusTours has a useful app that lets you follow your bus’s progress on a map, and see where the next bus is if you decide to disembark.
The audio version of the tour — everyone gets free headphones — included a lot of historical tidbits that we both found fascinating. But there are definitely some limitations to a bus. They can’t get as close as you like sometimes, so we saw the graves at Arlington Cemetery from a distance, and couldn’t even see the Potomac River when we passed the Wharf and the Southwest Waterfront. But now we know where to go back and explore!
Here are some of the sights we saw:
