As I enter my fifth month of residency in this lovely District, I’ve grown to know and love the most vexing road this side of the Mississippi: the George Washington Memorial Parkway.

Never mind that George Washington’s been dead long enough that we don’t need the word “Memorial” there anymore. GW Parkway is a lovely way to visit many interesting sites like Theodore Roosevelt Island, Mount Vernon, Turkey Run Park, the Netherlands Carillon, not to mention Arlington Memorial Cemetery and Reagan Washington National Airport (DCA). GW Parkway is actually part of the National Park System, the same system that manages national parks and forests, and is the sixth most visited site in the system, drawing more than six million visitors a year (mostly commuters!).

Understanding that it’s part of the National Park System allows us to realize the reason behind coloring all the highway signs brown, using 12-point serif fonts, and placing them no farther than 50 feet before the route change as to cut down on decision-making time. I’m sure it’s happened to you before; you’re cruising north from the airport and you want to get on the Key Bridge to Rosslyn. One little itty-bitty sign comes along and you nearly miss it. While you’re trying to figure out what the sign said, a new sign comes along with totally different wording, and commands you to pick left or right. Panicking at 50 MPH, you go right, and before you know it, you’re stuck for another 3 miles, and forced to go make a U-turn at the Spout Run Parkway.

Or have you tried to visit Theodore Roosevelt Island? You’re cruising from I-66 and turn south on GW, and you see the island right to your left, but you can’t seem to pull off into a parking lot anywhere. Ooh, fuck. So you have to go all the way to the airport, go through the terminals and go back north on the Parkway. And then you see the island approaching…and an itty-bitty brown sign says the parking lot’s up ahead. Before you can fully read and understand it, you’ve already missed it. Back to that U-turn at Spout Run. And on the way down, of course, there’s no southbound exit to TRI. So it’s back to the airport you go…

Who the hell designed this highway? It serves only as a trap to force people to recognize historical sites such as Lady Bird Johnson Park or the home of Clara Barton, while spitting them out at either Spout Run or the Airport. It’s a gorgeous drive, I’ll give them that, but it’s completely vexing to know where you’re going and yet not be able to GET there because you’re stuck on the silly road. I ended up driving through the Pentagon’s parking lot the other day trying to find I-395. Don’t ask me how.

I’ll tell you something. I don’t think of George Washington quite fondly when I’m driving on it. You think he’d want to lend his name to a road that could have been designed only by a Congressional appropriations committee?