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Please see the October 21, 2000 entry in Flat Teddy's Journal.

Please see the October 21, 2000 entry in Flat Teddy's Journal.

Please see the October 24, 2000 entry in Flat Teddy's Journal.

Please see the October 24, 2000 entry in Flat Teddy's Journal.

Please see the October 25, 2000 entry in Flat Teddy's Journal.

Please see the October 25, 2000 entry in Flat Teddy's Journal.

Please see the October 25, 2000 entry in Flat Teddy's Journal.

On the evening of April 14, 1865, President and Mrs. Lincoln decided to go to a play being presented at Ford's Theater, just a few blocks from the White House. (You can see the theater in the first picture.) At the theater they were given the choicest box seats and were relaxing in their chairs watching the play when John Wilkes Booth, an actor sympathetic to the cause of the Confederate states, entered the box and shot Lincoln. Booth then jumped up onto the railing of the box and dropped a considerable distance to the stage, breaking his ankle in the fall. In spite of his injury he limped behind the curtains and out a back door to a waiting horse which carried him away. He was later apprehended. Lincoln was carried out of the theater and across the street to the house you see in the second picture. It is known as the Petersen House today because it was built by a man named William Petersen in 1849. Doctors attended the president as he lay in a bedroom on the main floor. He never regained consciousness, and he died early the next morning.

Please see the October 25, 2000 entry in Flat Teddy's Journal.

This was a difficult visit for me to make, because I knew one of the men whose name is chiseled into this black polished-granite wall. "The Wall," as the monument is known, holds the names of all the servicemen and women who were killed in the Vietnam War. Near one end of the wall I went to a small, slant-top table that holds a thick book that reminds me of the white pages of the Denver, Colorado phone book: it's that thick. The book is attached to the top of the table so that it can't be removed. There is a perma-glass covering over the book that protects it from the elements, but it's high enough above the book that you can easily reach under it to turn the pages of the book. I looked up Kenny's name in the book and felt very sad that I was turning past so many names of other people who had died in Vietnam and left so many families in grief. I found Kenny's name in the book and the panel number where I would find it chiseled into the wall. The book also gave me the line on that panel where Kenny's name would be. I had to walk to the eastern half of the wall and find panel 33, then count down to line 40. And there it was: Kenny Stetson. He was the cousin of my former husband. I'll always remember him as a strong, young man who looked so proud and so handsome in his Marine uniform. He died in the battle of Khe Sanh in March of 1968. Someone had left the flag at the foot of Kenny's panel.

Please see the October 25, 2000 entry in Flat Teddy's Journal.

This touching monument depicts a 19-man patrol of soldiers who are advancing warily through a muddy rice paddy in Korea. You can see that the men are wearing ponchos to keep the rain off their packs, and they're carrying their rifles. The men are stepping over terraces in the rice paddies, represented by the cement bars on the ground. I think it was very appropriate that the sky was so gray and threatening the day I visited this monument. This memorial is a recent addition to our capital, honoring the Americans who served in the Korean War from 1950 to 1953.

Please see the October 25, 2000 entry in Flat Teddy's Journal.

Please see the October 25, 2000 entry in Flat Teddy's Journal.

During the late 1790s and early 1800s the U.S. built canals--over three thousand miles (4828 thousand kilometers) of them. They were used to transport goods from the coast to the interior of America. Many settlers moving out of the original 13 colonies to head west used the canals to begin their journeys. By the mid-1800s railroads had come of age and were expanding at a great rate. They soon took over the business of the canals and carried the goods and people much cheaper and faster. Today, only a few of the old canals remain. This one, the Chesapeake and Ohio, is one of the canals that are preserved as historical sites by the National Park Service.

The C&O Canal was to have run from Georgetown in Washington, D.C., to Pittsburgh, connecting two great waterways, Chesapeake Bay and the Ohio River. The canal had been a dream of George Washington, but construction didn't begin on it until 1828, after Washington had died. It is built along the Maryland side of the Potomac River, which is too shallow and rocky, itself, to be used for transportation. However, it was the water from the Potomac which flowed through the C&O that made the canal possible. Here at these locks the canal bypasses a particularly pretty, and also dangerous, spot on the Potomac, the site of the Great Falls. There is quite a drop in the terrain here, requiring several locks at this point in the canal.

It is interesting that construction on the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad began the very same day as construction on the C&O canal. There were many delays in building the canal, but finally in 1850 it was completed as far as Cumberland, Maryland--far short of the goal of Pittsburgh. At that point in time, the Baltimore and Ohio railroad along the same route had been in operation for 8 years, making the canal obsolete before it was even completed. Still, it functioned for several years to bring coal downriver from Cumberland mines and to carry manufactured goods back up on the return trip.

In the first picture you see one of the locks on the canal. As you can see, the planners had quite narrow boats in mind when they built the locks. In the second picture you can see one of the canal boats used today to haul tourists a short distance on the canal. The boat is pulled by a mule walking along the towpath beside the canal, just as in the old days. In the background stands Great Falls Tavern, which served as a grand hotel and restaurant for travelers on the canal as well as for other people who rode out to enjoy the hospitality there. Today it is the visitor center for the park; inside it is a room where two videos about the canal are shown. One of the videos is a report that Charles Kuralt made about the C&O, and it is very touching, as only Charles Kuralt's reports could be.

Today the towpaths along the 184.5 miles (296.9 kilometers) of canal are used by hikers and bicyclists instead of mules. Some sections of the canal are filled in with dirt and grown over with grass, but the sections like this one that still have water in them are great fun for people who enjoy canoeing and fishing.