This evening I went down to The Mall with a guy I used to work with in Dallas. He was in town to conduct some trainings. He wanted to take some sunset shots of the Capitol and the Washington Monument so I went with him. It made me realize something: The Mall in the evening, after sunset, is quite nice and I should make a point of venturing down there more often. I mean, what if, instead of watching the latest episode of Blow Out, which fascinates me for no good reason at all, I just went down to The Mall each Tuesday evening and absorbed the architecture, the lights. It sounds cheesy, but it really can be breathtaking, if you're in the right mood.

There are several good reasons to go The Mall at night rather than during the day in the summertime.

1. First and foremost, you can actually stand outside without being soaked in your own sweat from the awful DC humidity. Who decided to build our Nation's capital in a freakin' swamp? The only saving grace is that Washington has a few months of humidity but then it's over, unlike the place where I grew up, which is sticky and muggy about 9 months out of the year. In DC, eventually summer gives way to an actual fall, which gives way to winter, then to spring. And there is even a part of the summer that isn't plagued by humidity. So in all, it's about 60 days of wetness. This I can take. In fact, it's just enough variety to keep things interesting.
2. You will avoid the summer tourists. Come to The Mall between 11:00 AM and 4:00 PM on any given summer day in DC and you will see what I mean. It kind of takes the beauty out of the place to have that many kid-toting, shorts and baseball cap-wearing families walking around. I'm not really as annoyed as I sound. I know people want to come here and summer is the season when American families tend to travel. So it is. I'm fine with it. I think it's good. All our big cities have this same issue - Boston, New York, San Francisco. It's just that, most days, I would rather not partake, thank you.
3. There are plenty of parking spaces. You can drive down and park along The Mall in the evening without any problem whatsoever. Just don't stay past 1:00 am.
4. The lights. Taking in the monuments has a different feeling at night. When they're lit up they maintain a certain ghostly quality. It's haunting.
5. Screen on the Green. If you go to The Mall on Monday evenings, you can catch an old film for free! They've got a good line-up over the next couple of weeks, including The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, Suspicion, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, and The Big Sleep.

Of course, if you like daylight, crowds, and walking around with wet underwear riding up your crack, a summer afternoon is a perfectly good time to go to The Mall. You'll miss the movie, though.

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