But Springfield turned out to be more than just about Lincoln. It's a place where you can tour one of the great works of Frank Lloyd Wright. It's a town where the signature dish is a horseshoe sandwich and where the corn-battered, deep-fried frankfurter was invented. In short, Springfield is the spot for a quintessential American holiday.

My first stop was the Lincoln Herndon law offices, where Lincoln rose to prominence as an attorney. It was a perfect office for a young attorney because the federal courtroom was directly underneath. When Lincoln was alone in his room, he would lie down on the floor, open the corner of a trapdoor in the ceiling of the courtroom and listen to more experienced attorneys arguing their cases.

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In fact, Philadelphia got its start because of an invoice that was overdue. England's King Charles II owed 16,000 pounds to William Penn, but the king was a little short of cash, so he paid off the debt by giving Penn a huge tract of land in North America -- an area bigger than England.

Penn was an aristocrat, which the king liked, but he was also a Quaker, which the king didn't like. The Quakers were much too liberal for the king; they believed in freedom of religion, and thought that a government should represent the needs of all the people. Outrageous ideas!

Charles threw 10,000 Quakers into prison, Penn among them. So the opportunity to pay off a debt, and send Penn and the Quakers to a colony 3,000 miles away, seemed like a great idea. Penn could conduct his holy experiment so far away that the king would not be bothered.

Only one problem -- the ideas that came to Pennsylvania with the Quakers were the very ideas that formed the basis of the Declaration of Independence and the Revolutionary War. Some days, you just can't win.

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Today, Naples is one of the richest and fastest-growing cities in America. But because it sits on a strip of land that runs between the Gulf of Mexico and the fragile ecosystem of the Everglades, the residents are deeply involved in protecting their natural environment, despite the rapid growth. In other words, this Florida city loves the good life but it is just as concerned with its wildlife.

Naples got its start in 1885, when Walter Haldeman, the owner of the Louisville (Ky.) Courier newspaper, sailed down the west coast of Florida. He was looking for a healthy spot to build a winter home for his family. At the time, the lower west coast of Florida was almost totally deserted. There was no one in Naples -- no houses, no tents, no Native Americans. There wasn't even a Naples! But there was a beautiful seven-mile crescent beach lined with pine trees and palm trees. Haldeman and a group of his friends bought the land and drew up the plans for Naples.

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For over 80 years Miami promoted fun in the sun and for most of those years it was a complete and accurate portrayal. That, however, is no longer the case. In January 1995, over 200,000 people stretched out on Miami Beach, but this time they didn't come for the sun and the surf. They came to hear Luciano Pavarotti. Pavarotti and other superstars of the classical music world like Placido Domingo, Itzhak Perlman, Vladimir Ashkenazy and Mikhail Baryshnikov have all added Miami to their concert tours.

This cultural evolution might never have happened if not for a visionary named Judith Drucker, a dynamic devotee of the arts who is credited with being the first person to bringing world-class performing artists to Florida.

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The population of St. Paul is about 272,000, but it has managed to hold on to the charm of a small town. Its Grand Avenue is a busy shopping street, but the shops are tucked into old houses that give the neighborhood a friendly hometown feeling. St. Paul contains many preserved and refurbished buildings, many of which date back more than 100 years.

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The colonists didn't want to eat any unfamiliar food. Most of the settlers of the Virginia wilderness were from the English middle class. They were tradesmen and merchants who knew very little about fishing, farming and hunting. Fortunately for the settlers (less so for the Indians), the Native American tribes began to trade with them, and soon surviving off the land was possible. In fact, in just a few decades the colonists had a booming tobacco business going. It was an extremely profitable crop and led to the development of large plantations.

A 20-minute drive east of Richmond along the James River brings you to Shirley, a plantation established in 1613. These days it's home to the 10th and 11th generations of the Carter family, who let visitors tour some of the historically significant areas of the property, like the central hall of the main house, which features a 250-year-old "flying staircase." Supported by two wrought-iron straps -- each an inch thick and 4 inches wide -- the staircase is like an indoor suspension bridge. According to engineers, this kind of construction shouldn't hold. It's like the bumblebee that shouldn't be able to fly, given its disproportionate design, but manages anyway.

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The city was founded in 1158 as a mint and marketplace by Henry the Lion, Duke of Saxony. One of its most beautiful open spaces is the 900-acre English Garden, which sits in the center of town. Created during the late 1700s, the garden sprang from the mind of Benjamin Thompson, an American expatriate who'd befriended the Prince of Bavaria. When the garden was constructed as a park, open to everyone in the city, it gave Munich something unique: a place where people of different classes could come together in a relaxed and natural setting.

The rulers of Bavaria were into music as well as parks, and they made Munich a great city for music lovers. The National Theater is one of the finest opera houses in the world, specializing in the works of local heroes such as Mozart, Wagner and Strauss.

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Christopher Columbus is credited with
the discovery of the Caymans in 1503. In
subsequent years, sailors descended
on the islands for fresh water and
turtle meat, of which there was plenty.
Fishermen and shipbuilders soon
followed, and pirates -- Sir Henry
Morgan and Blackbeard, among others --
are said to have made camp there. But it
wasn't long before the spot was luring
tourists, and in the early 18th century,
visitors began sticking around to build
homes.

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The first references to Scotland's central city of Edinburgh appear in A.D. 160, in the notes of Ptolemy, but the area had already been inhabited for at least 6,000 years. The first residents were hunters and fishermen, followed by Celtic tribes who had been forced out of Europe. In A.D. 80, Roman legions marched in, hung out for a while and then headed home. The Romans were followed by the English, who may also be heading home.

The first site in the area to be colonized was probably a hill called Arthur's Seat, just outside of modern Edinburgh. Precisely which Arthur actually sat there isn't clear. Romantics suggest the legendary King Arthur of the Round Table, though no evidence supports that view.

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Take Antwerp, just 45 minutes from Brussels: Built on the Scheldt River, Antwerp has been a major port for more than 2,000 years. And as the statue of Silvius Brabo in the middle of the central marketplace will remind you, life in the city wasn't always as calm as it is now.

Legend has it that a giant lived on the Scheldt. He would charge an excessive toll to any ship that passed by his castle, lopping off the hands of anyone who failed to pay. The giant had Antwerp in an economic stranglehold. It was the Roman soldier Brabo who had the courage to kill the giant. Brabo, of course, chopped off the giant's hand and threw it in the river.

Free from the giant's control, the city prospered. The textile industry made many people rich and they showed their thanks by building one of the largest cathedrals in the world. Antwerp became a center for book publishing and diamond cutting. Great artists worked there. And good food became an interest to many who could afford it.

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The revolution of 1830 that produced a free and
independent Belgium started one evening in the
Brussels Opera House. The opera being performed had an
aria in which a singer cried, "Far better to die than
to live in slavery. Away with the foreigners!" It was
the perfect spark: The audience got up, walked into
the streets and began the revolution that got rid of
the Dutch.

To ignite a revolution with an opera is surprising,
but so are many other things in Brussels. Brussels is the
headquarters of NATO and home to more than 1,000
international corporations. It is sophisticated and
cosmopolitan and, at the same time, filled with
historic sites. What's more, the people are helpful,
are generally fluent in English and enjoy speaking it
with Americans.

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The Civil War devastated
Appalachia. Many people ended up poor,
isolated and uneducated, and they became
the subjects of these magazine stories.
They were presented as "backward
mountaineers living in a region within,
but not part of, modern American life."

Of course, there were thousands of
people in the Northeast who were also
poor, isolated and uneducated, but
readers preferred imported stories of
poverty rather than hearing of their own
domestic problems. The stories about
Appalachia were distorted. They focused
on the peculiar and the outrageous. They
ignored the natural beauty of the area,
and the skilled, intelligent and
responsible people who lived there. I recently traveled
through the Appalachian districts
surrounding Asheville, N.C., to see what
this part of the world is really like.

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The city is a monument to the freedom of religion and a center for music from Puccini to pop. It has a 2,000-year-old history of great, varied theater. It's home to one of the most romantic castles in Italy and the largest domed grotto in the world. The city's Italian heritage makes it romantic, but its Austrian heritage makes you show up on time for your kiss.

For the past several millenniums the sea has controlled Trieste's destiny. Trieste's position as the most northern port on the Adriatic Sea made it one of the most important trading centers in Europe. Sugar and spice came up from the Mediterranean and went on to central Europe; the goods from central Europe came down and went out to the ports of the Mediterranean and Africa.

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Turns out it was acceptable for the children of the aristocracy to meet
the children of the merchants in a cafe, and eventually marry the money.
That worked. The dukes got the dough, the countesses got the cash and the
city of Trieste got some great cafes, a number of which are still open.

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The Native American Utes called the land around Beaver Creek "The Shining Mountains" and had been living here for over 10,000 years when the first white men showed up in the 1840s. They were mountain men and hunters and they were just wandering through.

During the 1860s, gold prospectors started poking around in Colorado. They had come over from California after the 1849 gold rush petered out. One of the first things that a prospector learns is that gold drains down from the mountains -- the great mother lode is always going to be up there somewhere. So they kept following the creeks into the mountains. The prospectors who came into Beaver Creek didn't find the mother lode, but they did find enough gold to make a living and they settled down and built small towns. Normally, miners lived on their claim site, but these guys spent their days up in the mountains and their nights in town.

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There's gold in them thar hills

San Francisco was settled by 25,000 guys who showed up one afternoon to find gold. They came from all over the world -- Europe, Asia, South America and Africa. They were Catholic, Protestant, Russian Orthodox, Buddhist and Jewish. They came from just about every ethnic or religious group you can think of, and as they mixed together they established the traditions that make San Francisco what it is today.

Native tribes had been living in the neighborhood for thousands of years when the Spanish wandered in during the 1700s and began building missions along the California coast. But nothing much happened until 1848, when gold was discovered in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada mountains.

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We sang "Happy Birthday To You" which was copyrighted in 1893 by two sisters, Mildred J. Hill, a church organist and authority on Negro spirituals, and Patty Smith Hill, a professor of education at Columbia University. They were born in Louisville, Ky., and published the song together in "Songs and Stories for the Kindergarten." It was originally called "Good Morning to All" and was similar to several other songs written earlier. The tune was changed here and there and the words "Happy Birthday to You" were added to the second stanza in 1924 by an unknown lyricist, who neglected to apply for a new copyright. It is the most frequently sung song in the Anglo-Saxon world.

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In ancient Rome, there were more slaves than slave-owners and more paupers than patricians. One of the techniques used to distract the wretched souls at the bottom of Roman society and keep them from doing the math and overturning the structure was the Feast of Saturn. It was a government-sponsored festival that took place in the cities and was calculated to release the tensions between the "rich and famous" and "the never-to-be-rich and famous."

Cities are artificial, gridlike and designed to be structured and orderly. Many people living in them feel they require regular infusions of new life. Mythically speaking, that new life can only come from outside the city, from "Out There." The Feast of Saturn was essentially a strategy for letting the Wild Otherness into the city.

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And yet there are times in the history of a country's eating and drinking when the level of culinary skill and creativity takes its borrowed base and produces something so different that it is clearly indigenous to the nation. That is exactly what is happening right now in California's Napa Valley, where it will almost certainly continue happening well into the 21st century.

Show us the money

There are a number of things that produce top quality restaurant cooking in an area, cooking that can evolve into a distinct culinary tradition. First is money. If people will not pay for top ingredients and talented chefs, not much is going to happen.

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The capital city of Willemstad is like a mini-Amsterdam transported to a tropical climate. The coral reefs that surround the island have made it a premier destination for divers. The beaches have made it a premier destination for vacationers. Only 150,000 people live on the island but they came from more than 50 different nations. This extraordinary ethnic mix makes for marvelously multicultural traditions.

The first Europeans to set foot on Curagao were Spanish explorers who arrived in 1499. As soon as they realized there was no gold on the island, they set up a few cattle farms as a future source of food and shoved off. In 1634 the Dutch showed up and took control of the island. The Spanish gave up without much resistance. The cattle, however, put up a great fight -- but in the end were forced to surrender.

Architecture and the oldest synagogue in the New World

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