Travel: Washington DC

Odd, isn't it, what people think tourists want to know? Get on the open-top double-decker bus that tours Washington DC, for example, and you will learn that the National Cathedral is made out of 150,000 tons of Indiana limestone and has 253 stained glass windows. I mean, why would you ever count? And who's ever going to weigh a cathedral?

Who's ever going to weigh a cathedral?

The guidebooks are just as bad. DC probably has more museums than any other city on the planet - or at least it feels like that - and the guidebooks will tell you bland snippets on the highlights of each of them. Bear in mind that there are three million artefacts at the National Museum of American History alone … and already your eyes are starting to glaze over. That's not even counting the treasures of the Smithsonian. Anyone who hasn't been to DC might be forgiven for thinking that it's just one museum: arrive in DC and you discover that there are 14 of them.

Invariably, if you've got only a short time in DC, you will succumb to museum-itis. They're almost all free, and after all, when are you ever going to get another chance to see the Apollo 11 command module or the 1903 Wright flyer or the Spirit of St Louis? Nor am I going to knock the open-topped bus tours: if you want to get your bearings, to gain a sense of how Washington changes from the chic boutiques of Georgetown to the imperial grandiosity of Capitol Hill, there's no quicker way.

And yes, you just have to see some of those monumental icons: to sit on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial even if just to imagine Martin Luther King giving his "I have a dream" speech. To see the cold, dead face of war in the 56,000 names on the Vietnam Veterans Memorial - or the poignant statues of a poncho-clad squad of 19 stainless steel patrolling soldiers that were put up in 1995 to honour those who fell in the Korean War.

You'll get footsore too. No matter how much you take advantage of a day pass on the Metro system - and you should - chances are you're going to find yourself doing a lot of walking up and down the mile-long, museum-studded Mall between the Capitol and the Washington Monument. And if it's in the summertime - as opposed to the spring, the best time to visit, when the cherry trees blossom by the Potomac - you're also going to find yourself rather hot and tired too.

The solution? Specialise. Accept that your eyeballs aren't going to hoover up all the city's artistic treasures, from the Giottos and El Grecos at the National Gallery of Modern Art, to the Gutenberg Bible at the Library of Congress. In a city with museums for almost every kind of ethnicity, you're only going to be able to scrape the surface, even if you're there for a week.

With me, it's always history. At Arlington national cemetery you can leave the platitudes of the guidebooks behind and catch some of its strongest echoes. No-one in the guidebooks I read, for example, mentioned that the reason it's there in the first place was because the Union Army's quartermaster general, Montgomery Meigs - the man who perhaps more than anyone else, won the Civil War for the North -wanted to "sanctify" the grounds of Robert E Lee's mansion at Arlington by taking the bodies of 26 Union soldiers from the morgue and burying them on Lee's doorstep. A brass statue of Meigs' son John Roger, killed in battle in 1864, is almost the only figurative statue in the cemetery. He doesn't make most guidebooks either.

Look back across the Potomac towards Washington, and imagine the city as it was then. The Mall wasn't the imposingly grand boulevard we know now but an empty space a relatively small city didn't know what to do with (zoo, railroad terminal, woodyard etc). In the Newseum (the seven-storey media museum: I told you, there's one for everything in this town), gaggles of schoolchildren milled around the posters and newspaper reports of Lincoln's assassination. What struck me most was how dingy and provincial the city looked back then.

The big changes came only in the last century, mainly in the massive neoclassical building projects of the 1920s and 1930s. The key to DC is that the city planners used to work to a rule that forbade buildings being any higher than the width of the street they were on plus 20 per cent. That doesn't seem to be true any longer, but it once must have been: that same sense of scale makes it a city for the unhurried stroller, even one with museum-leaded feet, rather than the neurotic, bustling masses of New York's treeless, skyscrapered avenues.

Trees: I should have mentioned them earlier, because I never realised just how many of them there are in DC. The first clue comes when you fly into Dulles: looking down at the Virginia, it seems completely tree-covered at first, and it's only as you descend that you start to discern the roads, canals and railways that cut through them, then the buildings interspersed between them. And in DC itself, so much do the trees muffle the roar of the traffic that it's sometimes hard to imagine that you're in a busy metropolis at all.

Forty or 50 years ago, something else made visitors think the same thing. In 1960, Washington socialite Joseph Also was asked why he had so many dinner parties at his Georgetown home. The reason, he said, was that, compared to New York, there just weren't any good restaurants in the city.

No-one could say that now. This is a city that prides itself on its array of cosmopolitan cuisines. The hotel I was staying at, near Connecticut Avenue, made the point with a list of neighbourhood restaurants. Within a five-minute walk of the Shoreham, I could eat at Afghan, Lebanese, Egyptian, French, Japanese and contemporary American restaurants, to pick just six of 20 restaurants. Over near Dupont Circle, I was told, there were more Ethiopian restaurants than anywhere outside Ethiopia.

In the city centre, it's the same story. Although you can find good Chesapeake Bay seafood in such eateries as Clyde's, any Scot in Washington should make immediately for Againn, which not only has a menu ranging all the way from upscale fine dining at fancy prices to a reasonably priced gastropub selection - they also fetishise whisky: not just with a menu listing at least a dozen rare single malts you'd be hard-put to find in any top Scottish restaurant, but also by offering lockers for guests to store their own whisky.

Trust me: at the end of a heavy day of footslogging round America's imperial capital, there is nothing that goes down better than an amber taste of home!

THE FACTS

Return flights from Edinburgh to Washington DC start at 414 via Amsterdam with Sky Scanner (www.skyscanner.net). David Robinson stayed at the Omni Shoreham, a four-star business hotel in 11 acres overlooking Rock Creek Park. Prices start at 150 a night (omnihotels.com). For more on Againn, see againndc.com

• This article first appeared in The Scotsman, Saturday September 11, 2010