Four days in Washington DC: World-Class Museums, Zero Tickets

The memorials at the far end of the Mall are open every hour of every day, they are free, and they are much better in the evening than in the middle of an afternoon. So do them first, on the day you arrive, when you are not fit for a museum anyway.

Start at the Lincoln Memorial. It is modelled on a Greek temple, Lincoln sits nineteen feet high in the middle of it, and the Gettysburg Address and the second inaugural are carved on the side walls. Walk to the top of the steps and turn round: the reflecting pool runs two thousand feet east with the obelisk behind it and the Capitol dome beyond that, and there is a marker underfoot at the spot where Martin Luther King spoke in 1963.

The Vietnam memorial is two minutes north, down in the grass. Maya Lin was 21 and still a student when her design won the competition, and it was bitterly attacked before it was built and has been the most affecting thing in the city ever since. It is a black granite wall sinking into the ground with 58,000 names cut into it in the order they died, and it works because it does not tell you what to feel.

Then walk east to the obelisk, which was finished in 1884 and was briefly the tallest structure in the world. Lit at night from below, standing alone on its mound, it is the best thing to end an evening on.

Today is the Mall proper, and the trick is to be at a museum door when it opens and out again before the queues build. Both of these are free, neither takes a booking, and both are busiest between eleven and three.

Air and Space is the most visited museum in the country and it deserves it. The Wright brothers' Flyer from 1903, Lindbergh's Spirit of St Louis and the Apollo 11 command module are all here, in the same building, and it is worth stopping to register that those three things happened within 66 years of each other.

Natural History is across the Mall and is the one to do next: an African elephant in the rotunda, halls of complete dinosaur skeletons, and the Hope Diamond in a darkened room with its own queue. It is enormous. Two hours, chosen deliberately, beats four hours of drifting.

In the afternoon, walk east to the Capitol. The free tour goes through the old chamber and up into the rotunda under the dome, and it has to be reserved in advance. Even without a tour, the west lawn is where you get the view down the Mall that every news broadcast uses, and the gardens on that side are a good place to stop moving.

One museum this morning, and it needs the whole of it. The National Museum of African American History and Culture opened in 2016 in a bronze-latticed building at the northwest corner of the Mall, and it is organised as a climb: you take a lift down three floors to the fifteenth century and walk up through slavery, emancipation, segregation and the civil rights movement into daylight and the culture galleries at the top. Doing it in the intended order takes three hours and is the point of the building.

Timed passes are needed and they go quickly, with a smaller release each morning for anybody who missed out. Book the moment you know your dates.

In the afternoon, walk north a few blocks to the White House. Actual tours are hard to arrange and have to go through a member of Congress or an embassy months out, so nearly everybody sees it across the lawn from Pennsylvania Avenue on the north side or from the Ellipse on the south. Ten minutes, a photograph, and on.

Then Ford's Theatre, ten minutes east. Lincoln was shot in the box on the right of the stage in April 1865 and carried across the street to a boarding house where he died the next morning, and both buildings are open on one ticket. It is still a working theatre, which stops the place feeling like a shrine.

Save the water for last. The Tidal Basin is a twenty minute walk south of the Mall and the loop round it is about two miles, mostly under the cherry trees Tokyo sent in 1912.

Jefferson gets a domed rotunda modelled on the Pantheon, standing on its own across the water and facing the White House, which was deliberate. The statue is nineteen feet high and the wall panels carry lines from the Declaration and from his letters, including one about the necessity of changing laws as circumstances change that reads oddly well in a monument.

Halfway round on the western shore is the Roosevelt memorial, which is the opposite of everything else here: no dome, no steps, no single statue, just four open-air rooms of granite and waterfalls, one for each term, with quotations cut into the walls and a bread queue rendered in bronze. It is the most humane thing in the city and the least visited of the big memorials.

Then the airports: allow twenty minutes to Reagan National on the Metro, an hour to Dulles, and about the same to Baltimore by train from the main terminus.