My recent trip to DC was for a work-related conference and to visit our Silver Spring, Maryland-based family.  We travel there fairly often to see them, and so we rarely engage in the normal DC tourist activities because we've done it all so many times. This year's agenda included canoeing around Roosevelt Island in the Potomac, shopping in Georgetown, eating lots of crab, and visiting some bookstores. We were blessed with magnificent and very atypical weather for DC in August, so I was able to sneak away from the conference and enjoy some long luxurious walks out to the independent bookstores Politics and Prose and Kramer Books.