Reserve a hotel room several months in advance. The Cherry Blossom Festival is is so popular that many hotels near the White House and FBI headquarters sell out. You can find downtown hotel packages centered around the festival that require nonrefundable deposits, so be sure of your plans.
Decide what performances you want to see. The Cherry Blossom Festival includes more than 30 hours of live performances on five stages. Choose among traditional and popular Japanese music and dance and martial arts demonstrations. Some of these overlap, so you will not be able to see all the shows. Save some time for Taste of Japan, with restaurants selling Japanese food, and The Ginza Marketplace, where you can buy traditional Japanese products.
Pick a meeting place for groups to reconvene. The cherry blossom festival can draw upwards of 140,000 visitors each day in just one mile along the streets. Use public transportation to get downtown; parking will be at a premium. If you stay close to the festival site, you can walk to the festival from your hotel.
Experience the Blossoms by Bike, a family friendly bike tour by Bike and Roll (bikeandroll.com). The tour takes you to from the Potomac Tidal Basin to Japanese Lantern, the Jefferson Memorial and Hains Point to see cherry blossoms during the festival weeks. The two hour tour begins and ends in Alexandria, Va.
Take public transportation to Washington. Amtrak goes into Union Station, where you can get the Metro. A lower cost option from the Maryland area is the MARC Train, which also runs to D.C.'s Union Station. Dulles, Reagan National and BWI Airports all serve the Washington, D.C., area. The low cost Southwest Airlines uses BWI, but this suburban airport is the least convenient for downtown D.C. hotels. All three airports have Metro (subway or bus) service into D.C., so choose the one with the most convenient, lowest cost flight.
