Nov 24 – We visit Mission San Luis where Spaniards established a mission to convert native people to Christianity.  This mission also provided trade opportunities and a workforce to help support the outpost of St. Augustine.  The Spaniards lived in traditional homes, while the Apalachee people lived in round thatched houses.  The Apalachee council house […]

Nov 20-22 – The Spanish influence is stunning in St. Augustine.  This is America’s oldest city and has the oldest everything – the oldest house, schoolhouse, and oldest street.  A very walkable city with cobblestones and Spanish/Moorish architecture in the historic buildings. The Flagler College is beautiful.  It was once a hotel built by Henry […]

Nov 15-16 – Historical Savannah, Georgia, surprisingly is much different than Charleston, although not that far in distance.  Savannah has old brick/stucco buildings with decorative iron railings and balconies.  The style is not the antebellum style of Charleston.  There is a huge shipping port here.  Savannah has lots of town squares full of camellias, azaleas, […]

Nov 9-10  The weather has been rainy, sometimes torrential in the last week.  We did visit the Great Smoky Mountains National Park in Tennessee, enjoying the last of the fall colour in this area, but it was a drizzly day.  It has also been below freezing some of the nights in these parts of Tennessee. […]

Nov 5-6Two enjoyable days spent in Memphis.  The first day we spent visiting Graceland.  $95 for us both and we were on the basic tour.  A very slick operation it was, with a shuttle bus to hustle us across to the mansion for an audio tour.  The house was not as large as we expected, […]

1 Nov: We have been enjoying the fall leaves in Pennsylvania and Ohiopyle State Park.  Here we visited the iconic Frank Lloyd Wright house called Fallingwater.  Frank Lloyd Wright designed this as the summer home for the Kaufmann family on 1500 acres in the late 1930s.  His vision was organic architecture in harmony with nature, so […]

We enjoyed more free museums during our stay.  The museums may be free, but they get you with the cafeteria prices! Very long lineups at the National Air and Space Museum.  This museum has fewer actual airplanes on display than other air museums.  There are lots of informative displays and exhibits about exploration, navigation, telescopes, […]

In 1826, Englishman James Smithson left $500,000 in his will to the US to increase and diffuse knowledge.  This was a strange bequest as he had never visited the US, nor did he have relatives there.  This seed money established the first Smithsonian Museum.  This has now grown to 19 museums, all of which are […]

A visit to the Basilica of the National Shrine of Immaculate Conception, the largest Catholic Church in the US.  It has a large, colourful basilica with lots of mosaics, but is not as fancy as other churches we have seen. The US Capitol Building and the Library of Congress are impressive buildings with lots of marble, gold, […]

We will let the photos speak for themselves.  We have a warm sunny day for the monuments around DC and also take an evening tour.  They look quite different day to night. Our favorite, Korean Memorial Thomas Jefferson Franklin D. Roosevelt Martin Luther King World War II Memorial Lincoln Memorial Washington Monument Vietnam Veterans Memorial […]