smarter traveling, driving and spending
Visit these museum exhibits about presidential inaugurations online, including First Ladies gowns, presidential portraits, original handwritten inauguration speeches, and a recreation of the Oval Office.
Elvis Presley was born in Tupelo, Mississippi on Jan 8, 1935, which celebrates its most famous native year round, not just on his birthday, when there are concerts of Elvis music and screenings of his most popular Hollywood movies. Tupelo is more low-key, and far less glitzy or crowded than Graceland, in Memphis, which he
Read more
It’s one of the most popular and iconic songs of the Christmas season. There’s an interesting story behind the creation of Silent Night, Holy Night, celebrated each Christmas Eve in the tiny chapel in the Austrian Alps where it was first performed 202 years ago, on Christmas Eve 1818. The village is Oberndorf, near Salzburg.
Read more
Starting on Veterans Day, Nov. 11, and every day after that, US military veterans and Gold Star Families get FREE access to national parks, wildlife refuges, historic sites and other Federal lands. They will have free access to approximately 2,000 public locations spread out across more than 400 million acres of public lands, with a
Read more
What’s that saying – everything old is new again. Drive-in theaters are back in style, experiencing a renaissance as one of the few entertainment destinations you can visit outside the home and maintain social distancing. There are more than 300 open-air theaters in the USA, many of them open since the 1950s, before the advent
Read more
Memorial Day is a time to remember and honor those who lost their lives while serving in the US military, protecting freedom and liberty around the world. This year, Memorial Day tribute services at National Parks are virtual, with participation by 30 parks across 12 states and the District of Columbia, including Civil War battlefields
Read more
Eight buildings by Frank Lloyd Wright have been added to the UNESCO World Heritage List, joining the Sydney Opera House, the city of Brasilia, and the Bauhaus School in Germany as modern architecture recognized as cultural icons. The new World Heritage Site designation, entitled “The 20th-Century Architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright,” includes the Guggenheim Museum,
Read more
Visits to America’s national parks set another record in 2018, topping 300 million recreation visits for the fourth consecutive year. The 318.2 million recreation visits total is the third highest since record keeping began in 1904. It adds up to more than one Billion hours we spent in some of the most beautiful spots on
Read more
Bertha Benz was the first documented woman driver and the first woman we would describe today as an automotive marketing pro or influencer. Her pioneering and headline-making 130-mile round-trip drive in 1888 between home and her mother’s house popularized her husband’s motorized contraption. It was a road trip into history, which you can follow today
Read more
Where to go next: For a lifelong New Yorker like me, the wide open spaces and history of the great American West holds special fascination. Especially when it’s connected to the Broadway musicals I love, like Annie Get Your Gun. Both American and Broadway history are alive and well at the historic Sheridan Inn, in
Read more