He’s one of the world’s most famous detectives with one of the most famous addresses in literature: 221B Baker Street, London. Sherlock Holmes’ fictional address is the real address of the Sherlock Holmes Museum. In summer 2013, I waited in line for two hours (including two brief rain storms) to tour the townhouse of this fictitious figure. The...

When planning a Lincoln trip, my first thoughts would be Illinois or Kentucky. But at a family reunion in Jasper, Indiana, a cousin changed all that when he asked, “Did you know that Lincoln grew up near here?” That launched my mom and me on a Bonus Nerd Trip to Lincoln’s Boyhood National Memorial in Lincoln City, Indiana!

The Taft house in Cincinnati is big and it’s yellow. The Taft family moved to Ohio from Vermont in 1838. President Taft’s father, an attorney, moved his family to this Greek revival style home in 1851. The following year, Mr. Taft’s first wife Fanny died, leaving him with two small sons. He then married Massachusetts schoolteacher Louise Torrey, and they had four more children, including our future president, William Howard Taft, born September 15, 1857.

Welcome to the Texas White House, home to our 36th president Lyndon Baines Johnson and his family. According to the National Park Service, President Johnson “flew home to his ranch 74 times during his five years in office, living and working for 490 days, or about one-fourth of his presidency, at the Texas White House.”

Everything is bigger in Texas, and that is very true of our trip to the Texas White House, home of our 36th president Lyndon Baines Johnson.

You don’t just tour LBJ’s house when you visit: you see a working ranch with livestock, a schoolhouse, an airplane hangar and landing strip, lots of old cars, a state park and a national park with a river running through it, all accompanied by a driving tour CD with soundbites and era-appropriate music.

O! Say Can You See. In this post, we will see more from our tour of the Star-Spangled Banner Flag House in Baltimore. Flag maker Mary Pickersgill and a team of eight other women, including indentured servants, took just six weeks to sew the mammoth flag that survived the bombardment of Fort McHenry during the War of 1812, inspiring attorney Francis Scott Key to pen a poem that would become our national anthem.

“For the first time ever at a presidential library, you can sit behind the most powerful desk in the world,” declares the brochure from the George Bush Library and Museum. By traveling to College Station, Texas, you can sit in the “Seat of Power” in an Oval Office replica!

At Papa Bush’s (as my mom calls him) museum, you can get a souvenir photo for just over $10, I think. Or you can pay a small fee ($5 the day we visited) to have your camera “commissioned” to the museum for personal photos. We were all over that!