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I made the mistake of trying to go out to the Statue of Liberty on a fine autumn Saturday. It seemed that everyone in New York City had the same idea! In the first picture you can see behind Flat Teddy part of the long line of people waiting to board the ferry to go out to Liberty Island. The wait for a ferry ride was about one hour. We were warned by the park service that once we got out on the island, there would be a two-hour wait to get into the building at the base of the statue. No one was being allowed to climb the stairs to Liberty's crown that day because the crowds were just too huge. Teddy and I decided to cancel our plans, and instead we visited a Statue of Liberty mime in the park near the ferry dock. She would let me hold her torch if she could hold Flat Teddy. She thought he was a great little traveler--and so he is!

Two days after my first attempt on the Statue of Liberty, the day dawned chilly, gray, and drizzly. Perfect, I thought to myself. No one will want to go out to Liberty Island today. I got a ride into the city with my friends who live out across the Hudson River in Nyack, where I'd been staying. I took the subway down to Battery Park at the south end of Manhattan Island and got on the ferry without any waiting. Still, there were quite a few people on board the boat. Once we got out to the island we had to stand in line to get into the building at the base of the statue, but that wait was only about ten minutes long. Inside the building was a museum containing displays about the construction of the statue. You can see Flat Teddy standing on a model of Liberty's toes. Those are the same size as the ones on the real statue. From the museum we could walk out onto the platform right at the base of the tower and look straight up at the statue, which is the view in the second picture. From that vantage point, you can't see Liberty's toes.

There is a stairway that goes up through the inside of the hollow statue of Liberty to her crown, where there are windows people can look out of. There was an hour and a half wait for that stair climb, even with the few people who were out on the island in the rain. I didn't have that much time, so I didn't get to do that. In years past, people could also climb stairs up through Liberty's outstretched arm to a viewpoint around the base of the torch. No one is allowed to do that any more because the National Park Service is afraid that is weakening her arm.

I enjoyed standing at the base of that huge statue and just looking up at her. She faces the channel to the open ocean, where ships come into New York harbor. She has welcomed thousands and thousands of immigrants and visitors over the many years she has been standing there. I wondered as I looked up at her how my Swedish, English, and Irish ancestors felt at seeing her for the first time when their ships sailed into the harbor. I'm sure they missed their homes they were leaving behind, but I hope they were also excited to be arriving in America. I'm awfully glad they came here!

NYCtourist.com has a photo tour that you can take of a visit to the Statue of Liberty.

Flat Teddy and I really enjoyed our tour through this little house in Philadelphia because we could walk through on our own without a tour guide. There were signs to read in all the rooms, explaining about the rooms and their furnishings. Everything on display in the rooms was behind glass walls, so we were actually walking through glass-enclosed hallways in all the rooms. We could take all the time we needed.

Betsy Ross had been married only a very short time when her young husband was killed in the Revolutionary War. She refused her father's offer encouraging her to move back home, and she declared her own independence, asserting that she could support herself as a seamstress. She went to live in this boarding house with an older woman (whose house it was) and her two small granddaughters. The front room on the street level became the shop where Betsy took orders for her sewing business. The two windows above the shop were the bedroom/sitting room where Betsy could entertain her women visitors. The older lady's bedroom/sitting room, which she shared with her two young granddaughters, was behind Betsy's room, on the second floor. In the top floor there were rooms for other boarders, and the basement housed the kitchen as well as a storage area for boarders' extra belongings and also for bolts of cloth and other supplies for Betsy's business.

The most important room, however, was a dining room and parlor on the ground floor, behind the shop. It was in this room that Betsy Ross received her cousin and his commander, George Washington, who had come to ask if Betsy could design a flag for the whole of the country. (Betsy's cousin had recommended her to Washington.) Up to that time, each ship and each division of the army had had different "colors," as flags were then called. Betsy was shown a possible design, and she created a flag from it, incorporating her own modifications. One important modification was in the stars. The design shown her had six-pointed stars, because the person who created it thought they'd be easier to cut out. Betsy quickly folded a piece of paper a certain way, and with one snip of her scissors cut out a perfect five-pointed star, which she said would look much better.

Some of this story could be myth, but it is a fact that Betsy Ross did live in this house. And it's a fact that Flat Teddy and I walked through it one very bright, warm, autumn day, enjoying our tour immensely.

Here are three friends of mine--Patrick, Tessa, and Flat Teddy. They're posing in front of the most famous home in the U.S., the White House. We don't think the President and Mrs. Clinton were home when we were standing there. Every president except one has lived in the White House. But that one president would ride his horse to a hill on his plantation to look down on the construction of the new capitol city and watch the buildings going up, and just maybe he saw the White House being built. That president, of course, was George Washington, and the name of his plantation was Mount Vernon.

Patrick, Tessa, their parents, and I arrived too late at the White House to get tickets to walk through on a tour the day we were there. We just had to look into the gardens from outside the fence. But it was pretty exciting even to see that in real life!

Patrick, Tessa, Rose (the mom), Gordo (the dad), and Flat Teddy all stacked themselves up to try to look like the tall monument in the background. You've probably already guessed that the spire is called the Washington Monument. It was built to honor our first president, George Washington, long after he died. He never got to see it, of course. It is so tall (555 feet (169.2 meters)) that I had to lie down in the grass and aim the camera up at my friends and the top of the monument to get everything in the picture. We wanted to go up to the top on an elevator inside the tower, but all those tickets were gone, too. You really have to get into Washington, D.C., early in the morning to get to see some of these most special buildings and monuments. What was so special about seeing the monument this time is that all the scaffolding that's been around it for a long time is finally gone. The renovation of the monument is complete, and we got to see it as it looked when it was built.

Flat Teddy and I said good-bye to our friends who had been with us in the previous reports, and they flew back to Colorado. Now on this day Teddy and I had come by ourselves to see some of the different museums within the Smithsonian Institution. This picture was taken inside the National Air and Space Museum, and it shows how Charles Lindbergh's plane, " The Spirit of St. Louis," is suspended from the ceiling, almost like it's flying. Lindbergh was the first to fly a plane across the Atlantic Ocean without stopping. He became so famous that people ever afterwards would swarm around him when they saw him.

He was a sort of shy person, actually, and all that attention made him nervous. He just liked to get away from it all occasionally. His friend Henry Ford knew that he liked and gave a travel trailer to Charles and Anne Lindbergh to use when they needed to take a quiet trip. I saw that trailer in the Ford Museum in Dearborn, Michigan, two months ago. (It was right next to Charles Kuralt's " On the Road" motor home.) The top drawer of the trailer's kitchen cabinets had been pulled out and displayed for the public to see. On the bottom of it Charles Lindbergh had printed in pencil the many places he and his wife and children had visited while traveling in the trailer and the dates they had been there. I saw Colorado listed sometime in the 1940s. All of this story is a huge digression from the description of the Air and Space Museum, but it's what I was thinking about as I stood looking up at the "Spirit of St. Louis." For more information on this museum, be sure to click on the links in this report.

In the first picture you can see two-thirds of the huge United States Capitol Building. The part of the building under the dome is called the Rotunda. The wing that you see extending out to the right of the Rotunda is the Senate wing. Inside it is the large Senate chamber that you see on the TV news when the Senate sessions are televised. In that wing there are many meeting rooms for Senate committees and also offices and one very important place--the Capitol Dining Room, where I had the famous Senate bean soup for my lunch on this day. If the camera had been able to take a panoramic picture of the Capitol you would have also seen the wing that extends to the left of the Rotunda, where the House of Representatives chamber and all its meeting rooms and some of its offices are housed. That wing is equal to the size of this Senate wing, so you can get an idea of how enormous this building is!

Inside the Rotunda, on the main floor right in the center of the building, there are several murals and sculptures depicting important events and people in our nation's history. Do you recognize anyone in the sculpture in the second picture? You've read reports on two of those famous women. On the left is Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and in the middle is Susan B. Anthony. If you missed the reports about them, click on the New York (western part) button and read up on these famous suffragettes. The third woman in the picture is Lucretia Mott, who also played an important role in helping women get the vote. She was a great friend of the other two women.

Flat Teddy and I visited the National Postal Museum in Washington, D.C. In this picture you are seeing a bronze statue of a little dog named Owney, who stands right inside the entrance to that museum. The real Owney was a little orphan dog who was adopted by the Albany, New York, Post Office many years ago. Be sure to read Owney's story. A little toy stuffed dog named Owney visited my classroom two years ago and Ms. Osborne's fifth grade classroom last year. Each of our classes was participating in a year-long geography project with schools in 36 other states, and those Owney dogs got mailed from school to school. We followed Owney's travels that year through the post cards that he sent our classes as he moved around the country.

I learned many things in the Post Office Museum and had a fascinating time in there. The most interesting thing I learned, however, was that the three letters at the beginning of the name "R.M.S. Titanic" stood for Royal Mail Ship. The Titanic was a mail ship, as well as a passenger ship. It had a huge mail room below decks. There were over six million pieces of mail on that fateful trip. Five of the six postal employees that were on the ship died trying to get the mail bags up to the top deck where they hoped they could get the mail to safety. There is a memorial to those five men in the Postal Museum.

This picture was taken inside the National Archives building. I was very rushed to take the photo, and as a result, Flat Teddy is sort of in the way. The guard who was standing nearby was suspicious of what I was doing holding this card up so I could get it in the picture, and she asked me to finish quickly. So I took just the one shot and sort of messed up. The reason she is so careful to protect what she is guarding is that the documents in the cabinets in the background are the original copies of the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution of the United States, and the Bill of Rights. Behind the greenish glass on the wall is the Declaration of Independence. Light will damage the paper and the ink, so the glass is specially formulated to keep out as much harmful light as possible. People are absolutely forbidden to take flash pictures, of course. You can see that there are double doors that can be swung shut to give additional protection to the Declaration of Independence. In the long lower cabinet are all the pages of the U.S. Constitution and the Bill of Rights.

I had just been in Philadelphia where these documents were created over 200 years ago, and now I was seeing them for real! It was an awesome experience for me.

The American flag that flew over Ft. McHenry near Baltimore during the War of 1812 was the inspiration for Francis Scott Key's poem, "The Star-Spangled Banner." He wrote the poem with a popular tune of the day going through his head. That poem and that tune are now our national anthem. The flag that inspired the anthem was saved for years by the commander of the fort and later by his children. Eventually, it was given to the Smithsonian Institution to be preserved as a national treasure. Now it is being cleaned and repaired, after hanging in the Museum of American History for years and before that at the Smithsonian Castle for many more years.

The Star-Spangled Banner was taken down off the wall a few months ago in an incredibly complex operation that was videotaped so the public can see how it was done. Then the flag was moved to a special room in the museum, created just for this enormous task. One wall of the room is glass, and the public can walk by the wall and look in on the workers and the flag. The flag is rolled up on something that looks like a carpet roll, and then it is carefully rolled out little by little, spread out flat like a huge quilt. There is a huge long tray-like apparatus suspended over the flag. It rolls along on wheels that roll on tracks at the edge of the flag. The people who work on the flag have to lie down on soft pads on that trolley thing so that they can lean over the flag as they clean it and repair it. It is all very intricate work and done so carefully and delicately so as not to do any further damage to the poor old flag.

There is absolutely no photography of any kind allowed in or near the room where the work is going on. Scientists don't want any further damage done to the flag by an inadvertent flash going off. I had to beg the guards outside the door to just let me take a picture of the doorway. I had to show them the flash was off, and then I had to hope I'd get any picture at all because the hallway and the doorway were somewhat darkened. You are seeing a rather blurry effort, but I wanted you to see this much of the display, at least.

This is the Albert Einstein Memorial in Washington, D.C. It sits in a beautiful tree-shaded garden on the corner of the grounds of the National Academy of Sciences. You get an idea of the size of this statue when you see little Flat Teddy sitting on a fold of Einstein's shirt. Einstein is holding a book, and one of the writings etched into the page of the book is his formula E=mc². That was the mathematical equation that Einstein discovered to say that Energy equals mass times the square of the speed of light. Albert Einstein was the most widely known modern physicist. At his feet in the sculpture there is a large, dark, polished-rock, 28-foot circular platform with shiny dots all over it. You can see a few of those dots, along with the autumn leaves that have fallen. The dots are the tips of long, thin brass rods that extend way down into the stone platform. The dots are placed to form a sky map that depicts much of the known universe, showing stars to the sixth magnitude.

Maybe the most interesting point about this picture is that for just the few moments that I posed Teddy with Einstein, no children were there climbing all over Einstein and sitting in his lap. I have heard that he can be swarmed with children, at times. I had a more quiet moment with him.

In the first picture you see the Lincoln Memorial, which sits at the western end of the Mall, near the banks of the Potomac River. The Mall is a very long and very wide park which stretches from this memorial to the Capitol at the other end. In the middle of the Mall is the Washington Monument. The Lincoln Memorial was designed by Henry Bacon and carved out of marble. The 36 columns represent the total number of states there were in the Union then. The words of Lincoln's two most famous speeches (the Gettysburg Address and Lincoln's Second Inaugural Address) are carved into the interior walls of the memorial. This is the building that you see on the back of the penny.

The second picture shows the statue of Lincoln which sits inside the memorial. You can see how large it is by comparing Lincoln's figure to the two boys who were posing there for their mother. The statue was carved by Daniel Chester French, whose art teacher in his early years was Louisa May Alcott's younger sister May.

This picture of the memorial to Thomas Jefferson, third president of the United States and author of the Declaration of Independence, was taken looking across the Tidal Basin of the Potomac River. I was standing just outside the Franklin D. Roosevelt Memorial when I looked across and saw this lovely setting. The circular dome was a structure that Jefferson admired; he had had one built over the main part of his home at Monticello. The dome on this memorial is supported by 54 columns. Under the dome is a 19-foot bronze statue of Thomas Jefferson. Carved into the interior walls are words from Jefferson's most significant writings.

I had already walked more than three miles (4.8 kilometers) in Washington on this one day. I still needed to get to a Metro station to ride the subway back out to where my motor home was parked. The Metro station was beyond the Jefferson Memorial, so I had to walk all the way around the Tidal Basin on the right, out of the picture, and over to the Jefferson Memorial. From there I had several more long blocks to go before I got back to the Mall and could take the escalator down into the ground to catch the subway. I at last made it, but my feet weren't very happy with me for a long while! And where was Flat Teddy during all my exertions? Sleeping in my daypack.

Flat Teddy particularly wanted to be in on this report because of the little dog Fala in the sculpture. This picture was taken at the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Memorial, which is a very interesting structure. It's all outside and open to the air. There are four parts to it, representing FDR's four terms in office, and each part has a different kind of waterfall, one or more sculptures, and carvings on the walls quoting some of Roosevelt's more famous sayings from each term of office. There is also a niche for Eleanor Roosevelt, displaying a statue of her with some of her eloquent words carved into her wall. This is the first presidential memorial to honor a first lady. I felt as if I were winding through a maze, as I followed a sort of path around corners to each succeeding plaza. After all your reading about Roosevelt on Campobello Island off the coast of Maine and about his home in Hyde Park up the Hudson River, you know by now why this statue shows him seated.

Clara Barton, the founder of the American Red Cross, lived in this house in Glen Echo, Maryland, the last 15 years of her life. The house, built in 1891, had served first as a Red Cross warehouse, and then Miss Barton had it modified to living quarters and offices in 1897. She died in the house in 1912.

Clara Barton was born on Christmas day, 1821, in North Oxford, Massachusetts. During the Civil War she helped tend to the wounded at several battlefields. For four years after the war she helped search for men listed as missing. It was during this time that she said:

"I believe I must have been born believing in the full right of women to all privileges and positions which nature and justice accord her, common with other human beings. Perfectly equal rights--human rights. There was never any question in my mind in regard to this."

She traveled to Europe in 1868 and there heard for the first time of the International Red Cross as she helped with the injured during the Franco-Prussian War. She was so impressed with the Red Cross that she determined to bring it to the United States. It took her ten years of dogged determination, but in 1882 the U. S. Senate ratified the Treaty of Geneva, establishing the Red Cross in the United States. In 1898 Clara Barton again went to war, to help with the American Red Cross's effort in aiding the injured in the Spanish-American War in Cuba. She was 76 years old!

She had been living in this house for 7 years at that point, and when the war was over she retired here. She continued to be involved in the women's rights movement and kept up with a huge volume of correspondence. She loved looking out her bedroom windows in the back toward the Potomac Valley. A friend of hers said, "She loved her Glen Echo home and used to say the moon seemed always to be shining there."

Flat Teddy and I loved it, too, although it was the sun that was shining when we were there that lovely afternoon.