Downtown Silver Spring has a pedestrian-friendly stretch chock-full of restaurants, a handful of stores and a fountain for children to play in during warm weather. In a half-mile radius, there's plenty of ethnic dining, a local coffee shop, a few nightclubs and lots of new condos, some repurposed from office or industrial buildings.

Festivals are common in good weather, and the annual SilverDocs documentary film festival is a cultural treasure for the entire region.

The documentaries are shown at Discovery Place, the cable channel's headquarters, and at the American Film Institute, in Silver Spring's gorgeous Art Deco movie palace. Discovery's offices, built in 2003, and the renovation of the theater, also finished in 2003, were crucial to the revival of the downtown, which had been declining for decades. The area had $1.2 billion in investment in the early part of the 2000s, including a new Whole Foods grocery store.

Silver Spring, which borders the tip of the diamond at D.C.'s northern edge, began developing in the 1920s and 1930s, with charming bungalow-filled neighborhoods in East Silver Spring and Woodside.

As you travel north in Silver Spring, away from the downtown, there are plenty of Cape Cods, ramblers and colonials dating from the 1940s, '50s and '60s on grassy suburban lots.