I'll take Parkersburg!

Thank you, I'll take Parkersburg over Washington, D.C., any and every day of the week!

Washington is a great place to visit, but why anyone wants to live in the hustle and bustle, bumper-to-bumper traffic and shoving pedestrians is far beyond me.

Since the autumn of 1993 when my wife and I took our then-high school senior daughter to Washington to check out American University on the advice of then-Sen. John Glenn, we have been making frequent trips to the nation's capital to see her while she was in undergraduate school, later while she was in graduate school and finally when she and her husband bought a home in the district and settled into Washington as their permanent home.

Getting the two of them out of Washington would be about as easy as pulling teeth with a crowbar. They LOVE the city and accept all of those parts of living there that we find disagreeable.

Over the years we have seen the city change; areas where in the 1990s we wouldn't have been caught dead (although we feared that is what would have happened) are now yuppie condos, restaurants, bars, shops and pedestrian high-traffic areas.

Of course, the beltway, which always has been beyond belief with traffic, has gotten far worse. This last trip had us sitting in a slowing moving parking lot for 40 minutes to go four miles, before we got to residential through streets that took us another 30 minutes to get into the district.

The best part of Washington to us is all the restaurants, especially those in Georgetown and Chinatown ... even though the prices are absurd, as are the parking rates. I have to admit, when in Washington I don't closely follow my low-carb diet and tend to eat what I like, not what is best for me.

We don't do the tourist things when we go to Washington because  we're with family who live in the city. Someday we may have to try being a tourist, but I don't think that will be anytime soon.

Maybe the worst part of going to Washington, though, is the drive over and back, especially when you hit rain in the mountains of Interstate 68, as we did Sunday afternoon. Sometimes I think it's a toss up between which is worse: snow or rain in the mountains.