full plates

I have about a million things to do in the next two and a half weeks.

OK, that's exaggerating—but only a little bit. I have to begin and finish my grandmother's Christmas newsletter, which will be tricky since no one in my family has sent me any photos. I have some I've taken, but not many. Considering it takes about a week to get the thing to the printer and from thence out into the mail, I am seriously screwed.

It has to be out in two and a half weeks because we leave on the evening of the 16th for DC to visit some campuses before we make our way to the in-laws for Christmas. We fly into BWI super-late and will have to stay somewhere in Baltimore that night so Mr. Angst can make his 11am appointment in that city; I will probably take a train into DC to visit Georgetown (information session at 11, not sure how useful it will be). Then Mr. Angst will join me in DC and we'll both go take a look at GW. And then we have time to kill. I'm hoping we can send our luggage for the week ahead to the Angst-in-laws, and store whatever overnight bags we have in DC at the train station. But it's been a while since I've been to DC and I don't know if that's a good possibility.

So, DCers, here are a couple of several questions:

1. Where's a cheapish place we can stay (for one night) in the District that's convenient to Georgetown and GW and a Metro stop?
   
2. Are there, in fact, storage lockers or the like at the major stations? (I'm thinking Union Station, particularly, since that's where we'll be coming in from Baltimore on the MARC train.) There are, in fact, lockers at Union Station, as I suspected there would be. It remains to be seen if they will be large enough for luggage. No clue about stations in Baltimore.
   
3. Are there other things we should put on our itinerary for Friday afternoon/Saturday morning? Things we should see if we're very seriously contemplating moving to DC for school?
   
4. Any recommendations for rail/bus/Metro passes for our two-day stay? We won't need round-trip MARC tickets, I don't think, but what will we want for the Metro in DC?
   
5. At present, I believe the Angst-in-laws are going to drive to pick us up on Saturday (it'll be a few-hour round-trip for them, so we can't really stay with them), but if we need to rent a car and drive-and-drop, how tough might that be? This was a stupid question, as I know I can rent a car just about anywhere. Forgive.

These are lots of questions, sure, and they probably reveal me to be a bit of a worry-wart. But any advice would be much welcomed.

Meanwhile, I still haven't heard back from my Northwestern interviewer, which makes me a bit nervous. Time is short!