George W Bush’s Childhood Home in Midland and Monahans Sandhills State Park

The Bush home is an ordinary little house in an ordinary small-town neighborhood in Midland, TX, so it’s remarkable that it was home to two future Presidents, two Governors and a First Lady.  We’re given a private tour , since there’s no one else here at the moment, a school bus having, thankfully, pulled out a [...]

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Visiting Presidents HW Bush and LBJ

We spend the next 3 days learning about two Texas boys who grew up to be President of the United States – one a Democrat, the other a Republican.  It’s hard to evaluate the different presidential libraries we’ve visited without any political judgements or bias, but once you accept the obvious fact that the president [...]

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The Roosevelts in Hyde Park, NY

    FDR was born in this house, and he’s buried here in the Rose Garden.  Most everyone knows a fair amount about all that happened in between.  It’s the third Roosevelt home we’ve toured since we got the Navion almost two years ago (search “FDR’s Little White House, Georgia” and “Campobello Island, NewBrunswick”) and [...]

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Lindenwald and Olana – Homes of a President and an Artist

        I shouldn’t have labelled them, but I’ll bet you could guess. (BTW, I always use only pictures I’ve personally taken, except for the above of Lindenwald.  I didn’t bring the camera along, and really wanted to compare images of both.  Yay Flickr and people who share.) Both of their lives left me [...]

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Campobello Island, New Brunswick

Franklin Delano Roosevelt summered on the island as a boy, then enjoyed  this 34 room cottage retreat here with his own young family.  It was a wedding gift to Franklin and Eleanor, with the additional  bonus of not needing to be returned or exchanged because of any duplication from the bridal registry.  It’s still furnished [...]

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Rutherford B. Hayes Presidential Center, Fremont OH

      “He serves his party best who serves his country best.”  I can now attribute that line to the 19th President of the United States.  I also feel like I might be able to pick him out of a biographical line-up of Presidents after visiting his home and and presidential library and museum [...]

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We Go To Prison in our RV

We did.  We entered through the checkpoint of the Mount McGregor  Correctional Facility, the guards flagged us on, after warning us not to let Taylor out of the RV – “I’m going to pretend I didn’t see that cat,” one armed guard said. So Taylor has become an outlaw.  What picture of him will appear [...]

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The Hermitage

  It’s a beautiful site, well run and well worth the admission. Docents take you through the brick house, the rest of the extensive buildings and grounds are self-guided. Of the sites we’ve visited, this one did the best job of trying to explain and re-create the lives of slaves in this time and place.

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FDR’s Little White House, Warm Springs, Georgia

We’re staying in FD Roosevelt State Park, at this campsite. Perfect for visiting FDR’s Georgia “White House” in Warm Springs. This is where FDR was sitting, having his portrait painted, when he had his fatal stroke and died here in 1945. The unfinished portrait is haunting. So is his legacy. What struck me most about [...]

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Plains, Georgia and Jimmy Carter

Who would think that Dick and I would be alone in the boyhood home of one of the presidents of the United States, wandering through all the rooms of his house, standing in his bedroom, the living room, listening to his voice (okay, on tape). There was a group of school kids in the yard [...]

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