After more than a year of cocooning, Americans are ready to travel – everywhere. We look at one barometer of the pent-up yearning for adventure: who’s visiting Washington as the city emerges from rioting and COVID-19.

In the end, we cheated.

The assignment had been clear enough. One writer, one photographer, eight monuments, one day. Go. Take the pulse of late-pandemic Washington for a Memorial Day story about the prophesied return of summer travel. Will the district be back on vacation itineraries after its year of dread? Should it be? Take a day. See what it’s like.

But now it’s 5 a.m., the morning after our monumental day; 5 a.m., and the photographer and I are back on Washington’s streets in the black hush before dawn. We undock a pair of Capital Bikeshare cycles for two bucks a pop and are coasting again toward the Mall, toward daybreak, toward the Lincoln Memorial in spring air so soft the ride feels like floating. On 21st Street it’s all downhill, you don’t even pedal; at intersections we look for traffic but there isn’t any. We just keep gaining speed. We cross Constitution Avenue, curl up a slight rise under a canopy of elms, and all at once we see it – the 36 fluted columns, the radiant marble pavilion – the Lincoln Memorial, wide awake and white-lit against the black canvas of the sky. And we find exactly what we’re looking for. 

This isn’t how things started. Two days earlier the photographer and I had flown to Washington, on a plane that no longer blocked seats for distancing, into a Reagan National Airport that felt as busy as ever.

D.C., though, was not busy. That first afternoon, the day before our tour of the monuments, we visit the Capitol Building itself, curious to see the scene of the January crime. We bike there from Foggy Bottom (bikes are the perfect way around Washington), noting the scarcity of cars in a city where usually it’s hard to cross a street. We enter a Senate office building at the edge of the new security perimeter, pass through the first of innumerable guard posts with our press credentials, and make our way through underground tunnels to stairwells that will usher us into the main part of the Capitol.