Biking is my new favorite way to tour Washington D.C. You can rent bikes for a few dollars (that’s for the day, not per hour) and the bikes allow you to see more memorials in less time. A great place to start is the Tidal Basin.

The 2 mile loop Basin is surrounded by the Franklin D. Roosevelt, Martin Luther King, and Thomas Jefferson Memorials.

Half a mile away are the World War 2 Memorial and the Vietnam and Korean War Veterans Memorials. One more mile gets you to the White House to the north and the Smithsonian to the east.

I could go on listing memorials, but the point is that there is a LOT to see in D.C. and a bike makes it easy to see most of them in a day.

Take my family, for example. We’ve been to D.C. for the day a few times (we live 2 hours away), but we’ve only managed to see one or two sights per day maximum. We have little kids who get sooooooo tiiiiiiiirrrreeeeeddd when we walk from place to place. But bikes are beautiful. With bikes, we covered more than 10 miles in one afternoon. (We brought along 2 kid bikes for the seasoned child riders and a bike trailer for the wee kiddos. The rent-a-bikes are adult size only.)

Washington D.C.’s memorials are beautiful places to remember our Veterans. If you can’t make it to D.C., try biking around your own town’s center and see what you can discover!

Images courtesy of: www.wwiimemorial.com (WW2), roadtrippers.com (Korean), www.flickr.com (MLK), www.panoramio.com (FDR), http://www.tclf.org (cherry trees with Jefferson)