Hate to say this but that's pitiful. You've been terrorized. Don't give in to these losers. They haven't anything more deadly to offer than a acned kid in Tampa and some bigfooted doofus from France. Over-rated losers with a very limited shelf life.
It's mostly a function of where to go and how much time we have. We want to take the kids to Gettysburg, then out to Yellowstone. Only so many vacation weeks in the year. We'll do D.C. next year. We were there for the 4th of July 1987 with our older two boys, and it was awesome! We were very near the Capitol Building! The only drag was it took us an hour to get back to the metro and another hour to get to Gaithersburg where we were staying with family!