I’ve been wanting to go to Roosevelt Island for years but have never made a point of doing so. Last weekend A had some random academic testing at Langley High School in McLean, so I found myself with a couple of hours to kill.
I looked on Google Maps to see what was in the area…and, ooo! Roosevelt Island was only 15 minutes away. So I drove down to Arlington Cemetery and made a U-turn around their massive roundabout, because it’s a divided highway and there’s no way to get to the island from the right lanes going from McLean toward DC, and scored one of the last few spaces in the parking lot.
Apparently lots of people want to go to Roosevelt Island on a spring Saturday morning. They even have a running club that meets every week, and there are ranger-led tours from May through October
The island itself sits in the middle of the Potomac between Rosslyn and Georgetown and is a national monument (like Mt. Rushmore) to Theodore Roosevelt, which is run by the National Park Service. Happily there are no parking or entry fees and the only way to get to it is over a footbridge from the parking lot.
The island has a colorful history just like everything else in the area that includes Nacotchtank Indians, the Colonial families of George Mason, Thomas Carter, and William Bradley, through the Civil and Spanish-American Wars, and up until 1931 when the Theodore Roosevelt Memorial Association purchased the island from the Washington Gas Light Company to build a memorial.
Like many Virginia parks, there are lots of lovely tree-covered hills, well-maintained paths, wetlands, and poison ivy. This park is also home to a family of deer, which I actually managed to see standing about 10 feet away from me off the side of the trail. Bonus!
So that’s one more box checked off the DC bucket list before it gets too hot to do anything outdoors in the summer!
In-Flight Movie - DC Edition 
I remember my husband and I venturing over here when we lived in Arlington in spring 2020. We were wearing masks in all the photos, which looks funny now, but we kept encountering people on the trail. What a terrifying time period. But that is a cool island and a neat little nature oasis between Virginia and DC that I had never really noticed in almost 10 years I’d lived here the first go-around. 👍🏼
It is great that one can live here for a long time and continue to find new things to explore.