Tag: History

Philadelphia Independence park

We managed to pack quite a lot in during our fleeting visit to Philadelhpia on Thursday.

The main reason for going to Philadelphia was because of the part it played in the history of America’s creation and it’s independence and most of these historic sites and modern day museums are located very closely together in “Independance Park” .

The first thing we noticed when we got there though, was that the National Constitution Centre was closed that day (the only day of the year) because they were holding a ceremony to give out ‘Liberty Medals’ . Luckily, everything else was open.

The highlights of Independence Park included standing in the room in which the Declaration of Independence , the Constitution of the United States and the Bill of Rights were signed. We also got to visit the original “Upper” and “Lower” floors of the original congress building where the very first senate and congress sat (which apparently is why they are still called the upper and lower house to this day) and we got to see the Liberty Bell , which hung above Independence Hall and was rung during the original reading of the Declaration of Independence (and was ironically cast by a London firm!).

So, all historied out and with a few more hours to spare before we had to head to New York we decided to take a duck tour. For anyone who hasn’t seen one of these, it’s basically a bus which can float on water, so it can give you a city tour vie the streets and rivers. It’s also incredibly tacky and usually involves a ‘crazy’ tour guide who tells bad jokes and makes everyone make quacking noises using their “quackers” as they go round. It was quite fun though and luckily they didn’t give out the quackers until the end. The tour covered a fair amount of Philadelphia, including Benjamin Franklin’s last resting place and the US Mint and Federal Reserve.Oh, and we also got to see the original building used as the tower block in Ghostbusters 🙂

We’re now in New York, our last city! We’re one day in already so I’ll update you tomorrow.

 

 

 

Gettysburg Battlefields

I’ll be the first to admit that my grasp of American history is a little shaky, but we are learning lots as we visit the different cities around the states. Gettysburg was the site of a huge battle between the Northern (Union) and Southern (Confederate) troops in the American Civil War in which over 50,000 soldiors lost their lives. It only lasted 3 days but was the culmination of many years of fighting and its conclusion (spoiler alert – the North won) led to the “Four score and seven years ago…” speech by Lincoln in the ‘Gettysburg address’ made in November of the same year.

We first went to the Gettysburg History Museum which has a re-enactment of the entire 3 days – in miniature. It is the largest military diorama in the United States covering over 800 sq ft and each of the 20,000 odd models have been hand painted and positioned to show the path of the battle over the 1st, 2nd and 3rd of July 1863. With a 30 minute light and sound show to illustrate the battle it’s oddly impressive, although Jon and I both felt we suffered from not always understanding completely who was fighting on what side!

We walked around a second museum showing more of the history and several dioramas with full sized models – a little bit like a Tussards Wax Museum, but with more of a story (and a lot of guns)

Once we’d looked around the models, we then decided to get back into our car and follow an audio tour around a circuit of the battlefields. Its really interesting to be able to see history and then drive around where it actually happened – there is a 40 mile route around the path the fighting took over the three days, with thousands of statues and plaques commemorating the batallions, soldiers (and in one case, a small dog) on both sides.

We loved the idea of a driving tour but, in reality, keeping to a steady 15 miles an hour to be in sync with a CD and following an artistic interpretation of a map in a small leaflet got a little confusing, so we called it a day after the first third of the battle and decided to move on to Phillidelphia where we have more history waiting for us tomorrow.

 

 

National Civil Rights Museum

Our second stop today couldn’t have been more different to Graceland: The National Civil Rights Museum has been set up in the Lorraine Motel where the Rev Dr. Martin Luther King Jr was assassinated on April 4th 1968.

The museum is a fascinating look at the struggle to end segregation and bring equality to the United States; it includes hundreds of newspaper articles, photos and exhibits plus an audio tour and videos – even though we allowed over 4 hours (and I didn’t really think we’d need more than 2), we could both have spent several more just walking round reading.

Although some of the articles made for quite uncomfortable reading, the majority of the writing portrayed everything in as positive way as possible (minimal emphasis on the KKK and the Black Panthers , much more being made about the peaceful protests and JFK’s support for example)

It was interesting to see famous events,such as the arrest of Rosa Parks , told from the point of view of the actual participants but, for me, the real success of the museum was how it linked all these events into a timeline that explained how and why many of the events escalated and why ordinary people went to such lengths and took so many personal risks to claim their rights – James Meredith in particular stood out for me; the first black student to attend the University of Mississippi, his application took 2 years and the intervention of the Attourney General before it was accepted and his first days attendance was met with mobs, guns and required the National Guard and US Marshalls to stop rioting that killed two people (two armed guards protected him every day of the two semesters he attended the University). He graduated in 1963 with a degree in Political Science.

In addition, the museum itself is not without controversy…
Jacqueline Smith was evicted from the Lorraine Motel when it was bought by the foundation and has been protesting outside everyday since the 12th January 1988 – over 23 years so far. She objects to both the content of the museum and the use of tens of millions of dollars by the foundation to create the exhibits and buy the building opposite (where the shot is claimed to have been fired from – I think this makes conspiracy #4 in our current trip) whilst simultaneously displacing residents and pricing them out of their old neighbourhood… Whether or not she has a point about the latter is a discussion for another day but personally I found it one of the most interesting museums we’ve been to so far (although as cameras were’t allowed inside and it has no rhinestones, aliens, cowboys or rollercoasters, the photos aren’t quite up to Jon’s usual standard!)

Graceland

I can’t claim to be the biggest fan of Elvis. He didn’t write his songs, he wasn’t a particularly notable guitarist or pianist and although he was a ‘good’ singer I doubt many would say he was the greatest.

You don’t get to be pretty much the most successful recording artist in history without having something special though. Charisma, x-factor, controversy, an uncanny knack of picking great pop songs to record… Whatever it was, Elvis had it, lots of it, and his story is one of the most interesting in pop music. As a music fan you can’t help but be drawn to Graceland .

There’s a lot more to see than the house but we started with an audio tour of the Graceland Mansion itself. It feels exactly like you’d expect a mansion bought by a very rich young man in the 1950’s to feel. It’s lavish, opulent, completely OTT in places (the ‘jungle room’ has green grass carpet on all the walls and ceiling and an indoor waterfall), but it’s also nowhere near as big as you’d expect it to be. The main floor only has a living room, music room, dining room, kitchen guest bedroom and sitting room (the jungle room, which was built on an extension) so it’s really not that big. He did have a TV room in the basement with three televisions in it though, which at the time would have cost a fortune, but still it doesn’t feel like it deserves to be called a mansion. He did add to the house though, there is quite a lot of land with stables and a huge racquetball court housed in it’s own building which he added in the 60’s.

Also located in the grounds (in his meditation garden) is his grave and those of his family. I can’t have done much research on Graceland before going because I didn’t know he was actually buried there and I wasn’t expecting to see his grave or the hundreds of gifts, floral tributes and messages that are still left there on a daily basis by visitors. I’m not sure what I made of this memorial garden. You can’t help being moved when reading the tributes and I saw a few people crying as they stood in front of his gravestone read all the messages, but at the same time it was completely nuts and obviously incredibly tacky in places.

As I said though, there’s much more to see than the house itself. We spent some time looking round his incredible automobile museum (see the photos of his Silver Ghost, Ferrrari Dino and some incredible Cadillacs) and then had a look round his two private jets.

We finished the visit with a tour of another museum containing costumes and other exhibits that obviously wouldn’t fit into the house. I’m really glad we took a detour to Memphis to visit Graceland. You certainly get your money’s worth there and here were still more exhibits and mini-museums we could have done if we’d have had more time but we had to get to the National Civil Rights Museum which Jen’s going to write about in the next post.

Sixth Floor Museum

From Roswell to Dallas , and the scene of the assassination of John F. Kennedy , we’ve covered two of America’s biggest conspiracy theories in two days.

We arrived in Texas last night and so far it’s fulfilling every stereotype I had of it. The landscape on the drive towards Dallas is littered with “nodding donkeys” (oil pumps) and you can actually smell oil in the air as you drive past the oil fields. There are also plenty of billboards advertising gun shows in Dallas and Fort Worth.

We visited the sixth floor museum today, located on the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository , where Lee Harvey Oswald sat when he shot the president on November 22, 1963.

I’ll be the first to admit I knew very little about the assassination until today and I knew very little about JFK, but that possibly made it even more interesting. Because of the nature of the event the museum doesn’t contain any physical artefacts or exhibits, just newspaper clippings and photographs presented with an audio tour which told the story perfectly. The tour was comprehensive and covered the history of the man himself, the lead up to the event, a timeline of the day, the aftermath and the subsequent conspiracy theories. The highlight was visiting the corner of the floor and the window (still propped open) when Oswald hid.

Although the audio tour and the photos and clippings were great, I think what made the experience so special was being able to look out of the windows on the sixth floor and see exactly what Lee Harvey Oswald would have seen that day. We took a walk up on to the grassy knoll , where conspiracy theorists think more shots were fired from and looked towards the spot where the shooting happened. Then we drove our car down the route his motorcade took, right over the spot in the middle lane of Elm St. where he was shot. What was interesting is just how close the shooting, book depository and grassy knoll are together, a triangle not more than 100 yards wide.

It may have just been the bias of those who curated the museum and it’s unusual to feel sorry for politicians, but I left with the feeling that JFK was one of the good guys who still had a lot to offer when he was shot down. He’d  been president for just over 1000 days but in that time he made a promise to send a man to the moon within 10 years and diverted billions of dollars into the space race. He also diffused the Cuban Missile Crisis , forcing the Russians to back down and signed the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty . He created the Peace Corps and was a big supporter of Martin Luther King and the Civil Rights Movement , introducing the Civil Rights Act which was passed after his death in 1964. I may be wrong, but it makes you wonder what he might have done if he’d have served longer.

Anyway I’m rambling. We’re off to Memphis tomorrow and we’re keeping an eye on the news because there’s a big hurricane heading towards the east coast. It’ll be long gone by the time we get there but I hope it doesn’t leave too much destruction behind.

P.S – Not many photos today I’m afraid as the museum has a photography ban inside…

 

 

 

Tombstone and OK Corral

Tombstone, Arizona   is most famous for being the scene of the gunfight at the OK Corral in which Wyatt Earp , his brothers and Doc Holliday tried to run ‘The Cowboys’ our of town, but there are several threads of history running through the town, from the silver rush which bought everybody to the town, to the gunfight, to the creation of the courthouse where several men were hanged at the gallows.

We only had a couple of hours in Tombstone today but it’s impressively preserved and we had time to tour the town, visit the courthouse museum and see a slightly strange re-enactment of the gunfight just yards from the scene of the original gunfight (strange because the original gunfight lasted only 24 seconds and they managed to stretch the show to about half an hour).

We’ve just arrived in Roswell. Haven’t seen any aliens yet but we’ll see if we can find any tomorrow morning.

 

 

 

Calico Ghost Town

We left LA today and travelled to Vegas via Calico Ghost Town .

Calico is a former silver mining town, long desserted like many small mining towns in the desert here. THis one has been turned into a tourist attraction with a few of the original buildings still there. We found the original bits quite interesting as they told the story of the town and the people who lived there. The newer additions seemed quite pointless though and were mainly gift shops.

Still, an interesting stop, slightly overshadowed by the excitement of the fact that we’re now in Vegas.

You might not hear from us for a couple of days because tomorrow we’ll be joining in on our annual pub crawl. Although the pub crawl is taking place in Buckinghamshire as always, we’ll be doing our best to match our friends in the casinos from over here, which means I’m due a drink at about 3am.

What do you reckon, red or black?

 

Alcatraz Tour and Cruise

This post follows on from the previous one about our San Francisco tour here - https://www.jonandjendoamerica.com/index.php/2011/08/06/san-francisco-tour/

After our Urban Safari we were given our tickets for the Alcatraz cruise which were hard to come by as they sell out weeks in advance. It takes about 15 minutes on the ferry and they give you a quick introduction (and a movie) before letting you explore the island. The island has lots of buildings including workers living quarters, a lighthouse, power plant, warehouses etc. but the main attraction is the cellhouse where the prisoners were kept.

Rather than just let you walk around the empty cells, recreational area, dining hall and other areas unaided (which would have been great), you’re each given a set of headphones and a control unit you can pause, play, rewind etc. as you walk around. The audio commentary turned the tour from an interesting one into an absolutely fascinating one, because it was narrated by ex prisoners and ex guards.

Walking around the cells and hallways while listening to the sounds and voices of previous occupants was a little spooky but it really bought the experience to life  and we both came away thinking it was one of the best things we’ve done since we came here. Having been in Chicago a few weeks ago seeing the places with Al Capone used to live the high life, it was really interesting to see the 9’x5′ cell where he ended up and Jen had a go at being shut in a pitch black solitary confinement cell for a couple of minutes (I’m a bit too claustrophobic for that one).

Anyway, when we got back we were straight onto the last leg of our tour, a sunset catamaran sailing tour of San Francisco Bay. We got to sail round Alcatraz again and over to Sausalito , before sailing underneath the Golden Gate Bridge as the sun set. A perfect way to finish an amazing day.

 

 

 

Mount St. Helens

Our drive south began today with a trip to Mount St. Helens .

Mount St. Helens is probably the most famous active volcano in North America, mainly because of it’s large eruption in 1980 . The eruption was caused by an earthquake and the ensuing blast was big enough to blow the whole north side of the mountain off and flatten 230 square miles of trees.

We visited the main visitor centre at Johnston Ridge, named after David Johnston , a geologist killed while manning an outpost 5 miles from the mountain during the 1980 blast. The area had been evacuated but he insisted on staying and his last words on the radio was “Vancouver, Vancouver, this is it!” He was never found.

The visitor centre was really interesting with some really cool exhibits, including a real life earthquake sensor which you could set off by jumping up and down on a plate (most people were able to cause the equivalent of about a 0.001 on the richter scale), a great talk by one of the park rangers and a theatre showing movies about the volcano. This led to the biggest “wow” moment we’ve had so far at the end of the movie, when the screen and curtain raised to reveal a huge window and an amazing panoramic view of the north side of the volcano right in-front of us. There was a chorus of ooh’s and aah’s from the audience, none of whom were expecting it.

We’re now in Portland and we’re driving to the coast tomorrow where we should get our first view of the Pacific.

 

 

 

Museum of Flight

Before leaving Seattle for Vancouver this afternoon we visited the Museum of Flight .

Highlights of the day included a look round one of only 4 Concordes still viewable by the public and a tour of an Air Force One plane used by presidents Nixon and JFK. We also got a ride in a 2 person 360° fighter jet simulator which Jen quite enjoyed pulling barrel rolls in.

I’ll be totally honest here. Unless you’ve visited the museum or you have a particular interest in aviation the following photos aren’t going to be particularly interesting, but I thought I’d include them anyway.

We’ve now back in Canada again and looking forward to the next 2 days in Vancouver before heading back down to Seattle again.