Where's the best place to park in D.C.? Nowhere.

Upon arriving in Washington, D.C., by car late on a weekday afternoon with aspirations of retrieving my parked car sometime after 11 p.m., I was faced with a quandary I had never really encountered before: Where can you park?

During the six years I lived in Washington, I never really drove anywhere, and my only other recent parking experience in Washington was just finding a parking space for a few daylight hours on a weekend, and it was a breeze.

But yesterday, when I was nearing the sports pub where my friends were all meeting me, I texted a friend of mine who knows the area, "Where's the best place to park?" I was hoping the answer would come in the form of a parking garage's address, or an intersection like 18th and F -- something like that. But my friend informed me in a one-word text message that the best place to park in D.C. is "Nowhere."

He was right! By spiraling my way around town on the one-way streets, I did eventually find a garage at 1425 New York Avenue NW, that I believed to be not only accessible 24/7 but also rather cheap. But I guess signs can be misleading because when I returned to the garage at 11:30 p.m., it was locked for the night with no entry possible until morning.

This afternoon, the garage charged me $36 to have it parked there overnight and those few hours into the next day. So, I ended up paying a little more than I'd hoped for parking within 24 hours of the road trip's humble beginnings.