Explore Up Close is not a big travel company that mass-produces Washington-area trips. But rather a small innovative company working with clients that want to optimize curricular and real world connections, and student learning. While a little bit of "standard Washington" can go a long way (for many), great trips that take students out of tourist lines into the footsteps of Washington insiders – past and present – is the goal at EUC.
The question becomes: How can we create the perfect DC-area itinerary to match your curriculum or meet the learning styles of your students?
While Explore Up Close can custom design an itinerary entirely of your choosing, here are some company preferences regarding Washington-area travel.
Travel style?
When possible, leave the bus behind and travel by foot, metro, bicycle, or boat.
Incorporate active adventures into your itinerary: active modes of getting around (like those mentioned above), but also interaction with the city’s monuments and layout. To enhance your visit (or to continue your Washington studies after you return home), consider the following hands-on activities:
• transcribe epitaphs in a cemetery
• take a photographic inventory of architectural styles
• draw maps or landscapes from various vantage points around Washington (including tall monuments, city hills, and from the river)
• interpret the symbolism of the design style and placement of the various monuments and memorials that punctuate the city’s appearance
Depending on the geographic scope of your itinerary, consider overnight lodging in the central-city – walking distance from the National Mall; or in suburban Chevy Chase, Maryland – equidistance from the National Mall area, and less-visited sites like the Lincoln Cottage, the Clara Barton home, and Antietam National Battlefield.
Intellectual challenge?
Explore one or more of the fascinating stories that make up the historical fabric of the Washington / Potomac region, including:
Track down the Washingon legacies of influential southerners, from your home region, who made a mark on our nation’s development: John C. Calhoun, Robert Mills, and Mary McCleod Bethune, for example (all from South Carolina).
Compare settlement patterns, economic development, and architecture between your home region and the nation’s capital.
• George Washington’s personal economic interest in the development of the Potomac River, and the “national” fascination with land west of the Appalachians
• The designers of the nation’s first capital city – and what happened to their original plans, including the contributions of William Thornton, Pierre L’Enfant, Benjamin Banneker, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Latrobe, and Robert Mills
• The personalities who stamped the city with their influence and legacies: Thomas Jefferson, Dolly Madison, Stephen Decatur, John C. Calhoun, Francis Scott Key, Andrew Jackson, Abraham Lincoln, Jefferson Davis, Frederick Douglass, Clara Barton, Daniel Burnham, and Andrew Mellon
• the ancestral mansions, lands, and legacies of some of the Potomac Valley's "leading families" (Lees, Stuarts, Booths, Washingtons, Calverts, and others)
• the Lincoln assassination and the hunt for John Wilkes Booth
• the creation of "national" cemeteries, museums, and parks in the capital