Travelrific® Travel Journal
Picture postcards in prose.™ Check out the blogroll on the front page for official merchandise and other resources!Archive for U.S. travel
Early Television in Ohio
By Linda Tancs
Located in Hilliard, Ohio, the Early Television Museum houses an enviable collection of over 150 TV sets from yesteryear, many of them still operational. Displays include mechanical TVs from the 1920s and 30s; early electronic British sets from 1936-39; early electronic American sets from 1939-41; postwar sets from1945-58; and early color sets from 1953-57. The museum also has a library of books and other documents relating to early television as well as a collection of early picture tubes and studio equipment.
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Auburn in Atlanta
By Linda Tancs
Auburn Avenue is one of Atlanta, Georgia’s most famous streets. Loaded with history and iconic landmarks, a mile-and-a-half stretch of it is known as the Sweet Auburn Historic District. The phrase “Sweet Auburn” was coined by businessman and civil rights activist John Wesley Dobbs, the maternal grandfather of Atlanta’s first Black mayor, Maynard Jackson. The area’s Black history goes back to the 1920s, when Auburn Avenue became the commercial center of Black Atlanta. You can learn more about that history at the Auburn Avenue Research Library on African American Culture and History and the APEX Museum next door. The street’s iconic landmarks include the building sign for the Atlanta Daily World, the first Black daily newspaper in the country, which operated in the building from 1928 to 2008 before relocating. Across the street is the marker for The Royal Peacock. In its heyday, the Black-owned nightclub hosted such entertainers as James Brown, Little Richard, Gladys Knight, B.B. King, Aretha Franklin and Ray Charles. No visit would be complete without experiencing the Martin Luther King Jr. National Historical Park, where the Visitor Center houses the original farm wagon that held King’s casket during his funeral procession. The Atlanta Streetcar runs the length of the avenue for only one dollar.
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Big Boots in Texas
By Linda Tancs
In San Antonio, Texas, there’s a pair of boots decidedly not made for walkin’. That’s because they’re 35 feet tall and 33 feet long. Touted as the world’s largest cowboy boots, the fake ostrich-and-calf-skin boots are located outside North Star Mall.
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National Aviation Heritage
By Linda Tancs
The National Aviation Heritage Area encompasses an eight-county area in Ohio (Montgomery, Greene, Miami, Clark, Warren, Champaign, Shelby and Auglaize counties). Managed by the Aviation Heritage Alliance, the assets of the region include the National Museum of the United States Air Force (which celebrated its 100th anniversary last year), historic Grimes Field (the legacy of Warren Grimes, “Father of the Aircraft Lighting Industry”) and the Airstream Heritage Center, celebrating over 90 years of airstream history.
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Remembering the Gold Rush
By Linda Tancs
The promise of gold brought thousands of people to Alaska and the Yukon Territory in 1897-98. Their search for riches is commemorated at Klondike Gold Rush National Historical Park in Skagway, Alaska. The park is made up of three units in Alaska and one unit in Seattle, Washington, each playing an integral role in the stampede to the Klondike. The three units in Alaska are the Skagway Historic District, the White Pass Trail and the Chilkoot Trail (which began at Dyea, once a booming town as a route to the gold fields). The Chilkoot pass is one of only three passes that can be used all winter in the northern Lynn Canal area. If you visit this time of year you’ll avoid the hustle and bustle of the cruise ships that dominate Skagway during the summer season.
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Tea Burners in New Jersey
By Linda Tancs
A precursor to the American Revolution, the Boston Tea Party was a protest that occurred in 1773 when a cadre of colonists threw over 300 chests of tea into Boston Harbor to protest what they viewed as taxation without representation. A lesser-known event is the protest that took place one year later in Greenwich, New Jersey, when a group of revolutionaries burned a haul of tea headed for Philadelphia. The occasion is marked by the Tea Burners Monument, erected in 1908 on Ye Greate Street.
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America’s First Art School
By Linda Tancs
Founded in 1805, the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia is the first art school and art museum in the United States. Its Historic Landmark Building, considered one of the finest surviving examples of Victorian Gothic architecture in America, houses exhibition space as well as classroom space for the school, which is primarily located at the Samuel M.V. Hamilton Building. Between those two buildings is Lenfest Plaza, a year-round gathering space featuring a three-part serpentine bench, mosaic pavers, plantings and rotating works of emerging and established artists.
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Red River Art
By Linda Tancs
Formerly known as the Red River Art Center, the Plains Art Museum in Fargo, North Dakota, is the largest and only accredited art museum in the state. Housed in a renovated, turn-of-the-century warehouse downtown, it features special exhibitions of 20th- and 21st-century art as well as a permanent collection containing approximately 4,000 works of national, international, regional fine art and ethnographic objects. In addition to its collections, the facility offers art classes as well as studio and exhibition space for learning, discussion and display of creative work.
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A Cowboy Hall of Fame
By Linda Tancs
Featuring permanent and traveling western cultural exhibits, the North Dakota Cowboy Hall of Fame in Medora preserves and upholds the historic and modern western lifestyle. You’ll learn about the experiences of the state’s Native Americans, homesteaders, ranchers and world-class rodeo cowboys through theater, galleries, interpretive areas, artifacts and memorabilia. A centerpiece of the facility is the Hall of Honorees, paying tribute to the men, women, events and livestock that made extraordinary contributions to North Dakota’s western heritage and culture.
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Billed as the Great North American Eclipse, a total solar eclipse will cross North America on April 8, 2024, passing over Mexico, the United States and Canada. The path of the eclipse begins in Mexico, entering the United States in Texas, and traveling through Oklahoma, Arkansas, Missouri, Illinois, Kentucky, Indiana, Ohio, Pennsylvania, New York, Vermont, New Hampshire and Maine. The eclipse will enter Canada in Southern Ontario, and continue through Quebec, New Brunswick, Prince Edward Island and Cape Breton. This will be the last time any solar eclipse will be visible within the United States until 2045.
Be prepared! So long as supplies last, you can purchase eclipse glasses and other accessories, like a phone app and photo filter, from American Paper Optics, a NASA-approved manufacturer. The link in the preceding sentence is an affiliate link, which means that if you click on the link and purchase merchandise from the page, then I may receive a small commission.
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Front Stoops in Baltimore
By Linda Tancs
The Canton Historic District in Baltimore, Maryland, is one of the largest historic districts in Baltimore at over 100 blocks. It’s known for, among other things, its 19th and early 20th-century row houses. In fact, Baltimore has more row houses than any other U.S. city. These narrow dwellings are characterized by their front “stoops” (steps) instead of porches. Many of these steps are composed of marble from a local quarry, which in turn supplied the marble to build structures in Washington, D.C., like the Washington Monument.
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Billed as the Great North American Eclipse, a total solar eclipse will cross North America on April 8, 2024, passing over Mexico, the United States and Canada. The path of the eclipse begins in Mexico, entering the United States in Texas, and traveling through Oklahoma, Arkansas, Missouri, Illinois, Kentucky, Indiana, Ohio, Pennsylvania, New York, Vermont, New Hampshire and Maine. The eclipse will enter Canada in Southern Ontario, and continue through Quebec, New Brunswick, Prince Edward Island and Cape Breton. This will be the last time any solar eclipse will be visible within the United States until 2045.
Be prepared! So long as supplies last, you can purchase eclipse glasses and other accessories, like a phone app and photo filter, from American Paper Optics, a NASA-approved manufacturer. The link in the preceding sentence is an affiliate link, which means that if you click on the link and purchase merchandise from the page, then I may receive a small commission.
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