Across the south, there are numerous restored plantations preserving and celebrating the opulent history of excess and privilege of the white owners. The Whitney Plantation is the only one that tells the story from the viewpoint of the enslaved people who worked there. The plantation, which cultivated and processed sugar, is less than an hour from New Orleans on historic River Road in Wallace, Louisiana. Its French Creole raised-style main house built in 1803 is described as one of the finest surviving examples in Louisiana. Many of the original slaves on the plantation came from the Senegambia region of West Africa and are honored on memorial walls. Our guide showed us the slave quarters and described the work of a sugar plantation, a dangerous operation that used sharp machetes to chop the cane and huge pots to boil it down to crystals. Slaves who were cut or burned, which happened frequently, usually would develop infections and die. She described the “punishments” they received for different infractions – whippings, beatings, brandings – which also often caused infection and death. The guide also discussed the shift when the African slave trade was outlawed and owners forced enslaved women to have as many children as possible to replace lost slaves. The plantation, on the National Register of Historic Places, was used for several scenes in the 2012 Quentin Tarantino film Django Unchained. The gift shop has books of slave history and interviews conducted by the Federal Writers Project, a division of the Works Progress Administration, in 1937-40. On a wall, visitors share their reaction to the plantation with sticky notes, including one that recalls a poem by Aeschylus that Robert Kennedy used in his speech announcing the assassination of Martin Luther King:

Even in our sleep, pain which cannot forget
falls drop by drop upon the heart,
until, in our own despair,
against our will,
comes wisdom
through the awful grace of God.

The visitor concludes: WHAT YOU DO HERE IS IMPORTANT, underlining it three times.

Kites capture the endless-summer feel of the beach, sun and wind, and in Long Beach, Washington, you can visit the World Kite Museum and Hall of Fame. Each August, they host Washington State International Kite Festival. The museum started with a donation of 700 Japanese, Chinese and Malaysian kites. The 300 Japanese kites are considered one of the most complete collections outside of Japan. In 2005, the museum moved from a house to the current building right off the beach. It now houses more than 1,500 kites from 26 countries. When we visited in October, we were fascinated by the exhibit on World War II kites. It included barrage kites, flown from piano wire above unarmed merchant vessels in the Atlantic. The 2,000-foot wires were strong enough to shear off the wings of enemy planes. The British added bombs that would go off on impact with aircraft. Other WWII kites collected meteorological data and housed radar, and carried messenger containers that could be snagged by airplanes, allowing the passing of maps, reports and other documents. And target kites were flown above ships for U.S. Navy gunners to practice their shooting. Here’s a glimpse.

I am in awe of my friends who “paint with fabric.” They do amazing things with fabric and thread. So I was excited to see the La Conner Quilt and Textile Museum in the 1891 Historic Gaches Mansion. The Mansion is an attraction in its own right, having been lovingly restored and containing exquisite tiles around the first-floor fireplace. Photos are not allowed of the amazing work on the first and third floors, so you’ll have to go see for yourself. The featured exhibit on the second floor, Thirty Quilts for Thirty Years, showed the work of Caryl Bryer Fallert-Gentry, internationally recognized for her fine-art quilts. The exhibit marks Fallert-Gentry’s 30 years of quilt making, with each of the quilts 30-by-30 inches. They range from Bradford Fantasy #1, a colorful representation of the autumn pear leaves from her former home in Paducah, Kentucky, to the stark Casting a Long Shadow, a stunning depiction of two human shadows on the beach in Kauai, quilted in forms the waves made in the sand. Read more about the exhibit here.

After all that mind food, have a beer at the La Conner Pub and Eatery on the Swinomish Channel and watch the sun set through the Rainbow Bridge. Here’s a glimpse.

I have been fascinated by salmon since Tom and I owned a small newspaper in Fort Bragg, California, a vibrant fishing harbor north of San Francisco. At the time we were there, in the late-80s, the salmon fishermen were slowly going broke, facing more and more closure days as the salmon populations declined. So, I was interested to see the Leavenworth National Fish Hatchery, one of the hatcheries built to help blunt the loss of habitat when the Grand Coulee Dam was built on the Columbia River in the 1930s. Today, it raises and releases 1.2 million juvenile spring Chinook salmon into Icicle Creek each year. A pilot project is also under way to mix colder, pumped groundwater into the creek to improve fish habitat. You can visit the buckets, trays, tanks and raceways where the salmon move from fertilized egg to hatchling to fingerling to smotes, which are released in April. We later hiked along the Wenatchee River, where we could see salmon swimming in the cool deep water. Despite substantial efforts, salmon populations continue to decline. Here’s a glimpse.

The Hiawatha Rail-Trail is my kind of bike ride, 15 miles through the stunning Bitterroot Mountains, over seven trestles, through 10 tunnels, including one more than a mile and a half long, all downhill with a shuttle ride back to your vehicle. Genius. The route follows the former Chicago, Milwaukee and St. Paul Railroad, which crossed through the mountains to reach the Pacific in 1909. Construction was estimated at $45 million, but exceeded $234 million. The route hosted the luxury Hiawatha train, with Super Dome observation cars and Skytop sleepers. The line went bankrupt more than once, was abandoned in 1980 and converted to a bike trail beginning in the late 1990s. Signs along the route show where people escaped the 1910 fire called “The Big Burn,” stories of the amazing construction required to get over the Idaho mountain passes, and of the people who worked on the rails. A trail pass costs $10, a shuttle ticket, $9. If you don’t have your own bike, you can rent one at the Lookout Pass Ski Area. They’ll even give you a bike rack to get it to the trailhead. Here’s a glimpse.

When we walked into the Surf Ballroom in Clear Lake, Iowa, crews were setting up for a concert. Images of Buddy Holly, forever remembered for his last concert here, stared down from the walls, across the original booths, hand-painted murals and maple dance floor. In the wee hours of a frigid February morning in 1959, a 21-year-old (apparently unqualified) pilot was at the helm of a small airplane that plunged into an Iowa cornfield, killing Holly, Ritchie Valens, and J.P. “The Big Bopper” Richardson. The musicians were touring the Midwest on The Winter Dance Party Tour, 24 stops in 24 days. But the tour was poorly planned, with the artists zigzagging back and forth across hundreds of frozen miles in a bus so cold that drummer, Carl Bunch, was hospitalized with frostbitten feet. Holly decided to fly from Clear Lake to Fargo, North Dakota, to skip the bus and get some rest. Richardson, who had the flu, took Waylon Jennings’ seat on the plane and, when Holly found out, Holly told Jennings, “Well, I hope your ol’ bus freezes up.” Jennings replied, “Well, I hope your ol’ plane crashes,” a comment that he said has haunted him all his life. Valens asked Tommy Allsup for his seat, and they flipped a coin. Valens would fly. The plane took off shortly before 1 a.m. from Mason City Municipal Airport. Pilot Roger Peterson flew into a cloudy, snowy sky, although he was not qualified for instrument flying and was not given an adequate briefing on deteriorating weather in his path. The plane crashed minutes later, less than six miles from the airport. Investigators think he may have misread the attitude gyro, which gave the opposite visual of the artificial horizon on which he had been trained, and that he flew into the ground, thinking he was ascending. The wreckage was discovered about 9:30 a.m. Holly’s pregnant wife learned of his death from television reports, and soon suffered a miscarriage, prompting officials to change their policies and withhold victim names until notification of next of kin. Don McLean memorialized the crash in his iconic song, American Pie, in which he references how he heard the news when he was folding and delivering newspapers the next morning. “February made me shiver, with every paper I’d deliver. Bad news on the door step. I couldn’t take one more step.”