Old Town Pool

If your ideal summer pool experience involves screaming kids, candy wrappers and leaves floating in the water more often than not, and a staff of jokers whose lifeguard skills are questionable at best, come to the Old Town pool. I’ve been coming here all summer for it’s one saving grace: four 25-​yard lap lanes, which rarely get too crowded.
But I’ve found myself coming here less and less because I end up getting annoyed by the staff of teenagers who clown around so much you wonder if they’re even getting paid to be here. I’ve literally watched them throw each other into the lap lanes where people are swimming and kick around a ball that repeatedly ends up in said lap lanes. I don’t expect teenage lifeguards to be über-​professional, but I do expect them to act like they’re at a job. It’s not like $ 3/​visit is much, but the fact that people pay to use this pool warrants some degree of order for crying out loud. I won’t say much about the people who patronize this pool, but you can imagine how out of control this place can get if the staff is full of clowns.
The pool itself isn’t bad, although I’m not sure it’s vacuumed more than a couple of times a week based on the crap I’ve seen collecting in the bottom. Today I actually saw a cockroach chilling on one of the lane dividers, if that gives you an idea of how seriously cleanliness is taken here.
This pool has so much potential to be an oasis in the summer, and if it weren’t so convenient I wouldn’t come here at all. It’s worth a few minutes in the car to head up to the DC pool at East Potomac, which is a Roman bath house compared to this place.