Recently in _US: Mid-Atlantic Category

Friend of IT Emily King just got back from York and Adams Counties in southern Pennsylvania, in search of the region's best food and drink.

There are 123 wineries in Pennsylvania. I'm no oenophile, but I was floored by this fact. Amish baskets and potato chips maybe, but wine? Curiosity got the better of me, so my boyfriend and I headed north, on an otherwise dreary weekend, to check out one of the state's 11 wine trails.

Admittedly, we chose the Uncork York trail because of its proximity to D.C., but I like to think we chose it for the clever name. The guidebooks will tell you York is the "factory tour capital of the U.S." as it's home to Harley-Davidson, Utz (potato chips), Snyder's of Hanover (pretzels), and Wolfgang Candy Company--all of which, and more, offer guided tours through their factories. And while York is a decidedly industrial city, the outskirts look more pastoral than industrial, and there's nary a smokestack in the center of town.

Day 1: We arrived around 7 pm on Friday night, and checked in at the Yorktowne Hotel, the one non-chain hotel in a city of Holiday, Quality, and Hampton Inns. Rooms are big, if dated, but its proximity to York's downtown shops and restaurants make it one of the more convenient stays of choice. Locals head to Left Bank for those semi-special occasions, but pouring rain kept us inside and we tried the hotel's AAA four-star restaurant, The Commonwealth Room. We were a good 30 years younger than the average patron, but the food was good, especially that rabbit confit appetizer.

Day 2: As we'd previously learned on other wine country trips, a good day of wine tasting MUST be preceded with a substantial breakfast. Easy enough. We made the short walk on Saturday morning to York's Central Market. This is a treasure: 70 or so vendors manning fruit, sustainable meat, baked goods, and granola stands--all under a 120-year-old roof, in a National Register of Historic Places building that spans a city block. The market is only open Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday, from 6 a.m.-2 p.m. We didn't have time to buy our groceries for the week, but we did manage to stuff ourselves with omelets and the unforgettably moist and not-too-sweet mango raspberry French toast ($8.95, right) at the market's hoppin' breakfast joint, Mezzogiorno.

Now to the wine.

The six wineries we'd chosen were not exactly next door to each other, so I plotted each point on a Google map before departure, then we used Patten's iPhone to do the rest of the navigating. (You can also access maps here, or at the Visitor's Center in downtown York). Our first stop was Nissley Vineyards in Bainbridge (Lancaster County), home to an 18th-century mill and modern, stone-arch winery...and 300 acres of land. Like most PA wineries--as we'd soon learn--Nissley specializes in sweet. "Ninety percent of Americans drink sweet wine," says winemaker Bill Gulvin, "so that's what we focus on." After a tour of the tanks (no barrels used here), we gathered with another ten or so folks outside to taste the wines. Most were too sweet for us--with names like "Rhapsody in Blue" and "Whisper White"--but we did take home two bottles of their decadent black raspberry dessert wine ($14), which Patten wants to pour over ice cream.

Low-key best defines our next stop. Moon Dancer Winery in Wrightsville may look like a French château from its exterior, but inside it's another story. Elmer the dog greats you at the door, and when you take a seat at the tasting counter, you get the feeling you're hanging out in your buddy's kitchen. Judging by the locals around us who have come for a full glass of wine (not tasting sips), the tasting room seems to double as a bar. The walls are smothered in local art--there's a good chance the artist will be on site, hawking his work. Ask for a look-see at the tanks and barrels in the "cellar," essentially an unfinished basement filled with wine-making doodads.

To mark Veterans' Day, here's a bit on the Civil War-themed camping trip I took last weekend with my husband and our goofy dog. It was our last camping trip of the season. Smoke inhalation (we had a little trouble with the cabin's stove) and frozen digits aside, we had a great time. It's amazing how much history and wildness is so close to Washington, DC.

About 60 miles out of DC we arrived at the Treehouse Camp at Maple Wood Campground in Roehersville, MD, just outside historic Burkittsville, home of the fictional Blair Witch. We'd booked a cabin for two nights. It was rustic but clean. We headed to Boonsboro (founded in 1792 by cousins of Daniel Boone) for food and beer before night fell. The campground's owner recommended Palettie, a cozy Italian restaurant offering hearty food, much of it organic and locally sourced.

The next morning we woke early; cold and eager for the sun to rise. We headed to tiny Weversville to hook up with the Appalachian Trial. Fifteen minutes on the trail, dodging sections of Highway 340 above us, we arrived at the Chesapeake & Ohio Canal Towpath. We hiked along the Potomac River, remnants of the old canal, and the rail line, three miles west to the confluence of the Potomac and Shenandoah Rivers at Harpers Ferry, West Virginia. We coaxed our horrified dog across the old railroad bridge into the historic town and explored. Site of abolitionist John Brown's raid of the federal garrison there in 1859, Harpers Ferry is also significant for the range and quantity of weapons it produced, outfitting even the Lewis and Clark Expedition in 1803. The hilly town features a lot of quaint places to eat though most are pricey and crowded with day-trippers.

As the sun began to sink, we hustled back along the towpath to the Appalachian Trail and our car. Another trip to Boonsboro for provisions, this time pulled pork sandwiches, coleslaw, and fries from The Mountainside Deli. The darkness and the chill in the air made for an early (and smoky) night. If camping isn't your thing, check out the recently renovated eight-room Inn BoonsBoro, part B&B, part boutique hotel owned by novelist Nora Roberts and her husband, bookseller Bruce Wilder. The inn is housed in the town's first stone building, likely from the 1790s. Its rooms are named after literary couples who found their happy endings: Jane and Rochester, Nick and Nora, and even Westley and Buttercup from The Princess Bride.

The following morning we headed off to the Antietam National Battlefield, site of the bloodiest single-day battle in American history during which 23,000 of the 100,000 men fighting were killed, injured, or went missing. We opted for the self-guided 8.5-mile, 11-stop tour of the expansive battlefield in the car, hopping in and out as we desired. Antietam impressed me; its topography is carefully preserved and provides a sense of the battle's stages and scale. The signage was meticulous and everywhere.

Next time you're in DC, consider moving beyond the city's monuments and checking out historic and beautiful sights beyond its borders. Living in DC for over six years, I'm constantly finding new and authentic places to explore.

On December 5th, Antietam will put on its annual Battlefield Memorial Illumination, during which 23,000 candles will be lit starting at 6 pm, one for each of the soldiers, Confederate as well as Federal, who died at Antietam on September 12, 1862.

Photo: courtesy NPS

Going to the World Series this year? Whether you're a Phillies or Yankees fans (I'm just upset my hometown Nationals forgot how to play ball this year), here are some tips on traveling in both cities.

Getting There
Call it the Amtrak Series, but the cheapest way to get from city to city is by bus. Budget buses Megabus and BoltBus both offer inexpensive fares between Philadelphia and New York.

Philadelphia

I Heart My City: Philadelphia
Albert Lee serves as concierge at the Independence Visitor Centerhttp://www.independencevisitorcenter.com/, and tells us what to do, see, and where to eat in the City of Brotherly Love.

Philadelphia On Foot
One of the best ways to explore the city is by foot. Print out our map of Philly's Northern Liberties neighborhood, and check out more tips on visiting the historic neighborhood from IT.

Family Vacation Planner: Pennsylvania
Get cool tips on all the places to take your kids in and around Philadelphia.

Philadelphia's Italian Market
Philadelphia is home to America's longest-operating outdoor market, and writer Jeff DiNunzio shares some insider tips on the best spots to visit.

Click below for tips on traveling in New York City.

Contributing editor James Conaway is also our resident art buff, so we've asked him to review some of the best exhibits he visits in his travels. Today he contrasts two exhibits currently on display at the Corcoran Gallery in D.C.

Washington, D.C.'s prestigious Corcoran Gallery of Art currently has two oddly complementary exhibits of special interest to visitors and residents alike. The first is Oil, by the Canadian photographer Edward Burtynsky, which opened this past weekend. It's a heroic display of wall-size photographs taken over a decade that document the influence of the world's most ubiquitous, dwindling resource upon our environment and upon ourselves. The second, Sargent and the Sea, is an antiphonal, painterly alternative to this reality by the 19th-century artist, John Singer Sargent, whose early drawings and paintings depict a still pristine, unhydro-carbonated, impossibly naive world.

Burtynsky's odyssey to some of the least lovely assemblages of post-industrial detritus can best be described as dreadfully gorgeous. "Industrial sublime" is the phrase used by the curators, and that works, although the word sublime was intended for natural phenomena of such grandeur and power that the beholder is transported to a nether space somewhere between fear and ecstasy. Well, when you're confronted with the derriere-end products and landscapes of a century of unbridled internal combustion, you too will be both afraid and aesthetically moved.

Contributing editor James Conaway is also our resident art buff, so and we always appreciate his willingness to offer us a tour of some of the new exhibits he finds during his travels.

National Gallery of Art in Washington: so-called "modern" art has ingeniously been made not just accessible, but practically participatory. We're not talking about amateurs here, but the likes of Mark Rothko, Frank Stella, Claes Oldenburg, and Jasper Johns up close and personal, at least as far as inspiration and technique are concerned.

For the gallery's latest exhibit, The Robert and Jane Meyerhoff Collection: Selected Works, curators dipped into the permanent Meyerhoff trove, came up with 126 exemplary works from the late '50s to the present, and then radically grouped them according to theme, i.e. "Scrape," "Line," "Drip," even "Stripe to Zip," as well as more conceptual categories like figure, frame, and "concentrity." The result's a riveting meander through half a century of fine painting, sculpture, drawings, and prints categorized not by year or artist, but according to the ways in which the artists themselves made the leap from idea to creation.

Travel writer Chris O'Toole sends along a dispatch from a quiet corner of Pittsburgh, where the G-20 Summit is being hosted this week.

Before they discuss firing up the world economy, leaders at the G-20 Summit, beginning today in Pittsburgh, get a chance to chill out in one of my favorite places, Phipps Conservatory and Botanical Gardens. Tonight President Obama welcomes the A-list crowd for dinner at this classic Victorian glasshouse with a twenty-first century twist. Tweaks like geothermal heating tubes, passive cooling in its indoor tropical forest and a grass roof atop its subterranean entrance makes it one of the greenest greenhouses in the world.

In conjunction with his upcoming book, Here Is Where: In Search of America's Great Forgotten History, we're following historian and Legacy Project founder Andrew Carroll as he drives, flies, walks, boats, buses, bikes, and hikes to seek out little-known historic sites in all 50 states. Bookmark all of his posts here.

Bob Marley was...here??

Reggae probably isn't the first thing that comes to people's minds when they think of the state of Delaware. But thanks to my extraordinary young assistant this summer, Dima Kislovskiy, I just passed through Newark, Delaware, to photograph sites related to Bob Marley, who's done more than any other artist to popularize reggae music.

Marley's mother had been living in Wilmington since 1963 when Bob moved there in 1966, hoping to earn enough money to start his own record label. Under the alias Donald Marley, he worked as a DuPont lab assistant and at the Chrysler assembly plant just across the street from the University of Delaware campus.

The facility was opened in 1951 to build U.S. Army tanks, and then six years later it began manufacturing cars until management shut the whole place down last year. While the massive buildings don't appear to have deteriorated much, weeds now peek through cracks in the abandoned, football field-size parking lots and the lawns and grounds are showing the first hint of neglect.

Bob Marley returned to Jamaica with enough money to launch Wail'n Soul'm, but he didn't forget his time in Delaware; two songs, "It's Alright" (from the 1970 album Soul Rebels) and "Night Shift" (from Rastaman Vibration, released in 1976) allude to his experiences in America's first state.

Next week: The Marias River, Montana

Über-author Dan Brown is about to strike Washington, and everyone is getting ready. Brown, whose first two blockbuster novels, The Da Vinci Code and Angels and Demons, have taken up permanent residence on the Times best-seller list and have been Hanksified for Hollywood, has written his next book, The Lost Symbol, about the hidden secrets of Masonic Washington. And the actual Masonic Washington -- the people who work at Masonic sites throughout the city -- are preparing for the onslaught of tourists, according to a story last week in the Washington Post.

"I'm expecting [tourism] to skyrocket," says Heather Calloway, director of special programs for the Masonic House of the Temple on 16th Street NW, which receives about 10,000 visitors a year. She will double the staff of part-time tour guides, if necessary, to handle the crush.

"We might have to spend the next 25 years responding to Dan Brown's fiction," says Mark Tabbert, director of collections at the George Washington Masonic National Memorial in Alexandria. "That's what I dread." (Think he's overstating? Wait until you hear from his European counterparts, who are still drowning in their own Brown invasions.)

Senior editor Norie Quintos, just back from a weekend in Virginia's Northern Neck, filed this report.

Originally, I was supposed to go camping on the beach in Delaware with my friend Scott, but work piled up and we seriously needed Wi-Fi. Serendipitously, friends offered us their vacation home in Irvington, Virginia. Even better, we could bring the dog.

A few hours' drive southeast of Washington, D.C., Virginia's Northern Neck is the oft-overlooked sister of Maryland's more famous Eastern Shore. Many Washingtonians have no idea what or where it is (it's a peninsula and the surrounds between the Potomac and Rappahannock Rivers that spills into the Chesapeake Bay), though that has been changing as Eastern Shore properties have risen in price.

A few Northern Neck villages, such as Irvington, have been "discovered," and are developing rapidly. A longtime family-run resort, the Tides Inn, was purchased and overhauled in 2001 and turned into a member in good standing of Leading Hotels of the World. Plans are underway for a waterside condo development. Local entrepreneur/wheeler-dealer Bill Westbrook came on the scene and (with various partners) turned an old Victorian schoolhouse into the charming Hope and Glory Inn, and opened the hip restaurant Trick Dog Café, and a vineyard/winery called White Fences. These upgraded amenities have lured a different demographic, including the last-kid-in-college-now-I've-got-time-and-money set from Richmond (an hour away) and Washington, D.C. (three hours away).

Some urbanites have bought in to the weekend-in-the-country lifestyle through another of Westbrook's ventures, the Tents at Vineyard Grove, overlooking the White Fences winery. This is where our friends have their vacation home. The 19 tents are not of the Coleman variety but are deluxe painted wood versions of revival tents put up during 19th-century Pentecostalist preacher gatherings common in this area. The air-conditioned three-bedroom/two-bath Carpenter Gothic houses have covered decks, full kitchens, living/dining room with fireplace, and outdoor shower. Most are privately owned and some are rentable through Hope and Glory Inn or through vacation home rental websites.

Here at Traveler we often say the hardest part about our job is being stuck in an office while we tirelessly research exotic and exciting destinations. Instead of overdrawing on vacation days, we have to find alternative remedies to cure our wanderlust. Last week, I quelled my travel bug, and a hungry stomach, without having to purchase a plane ticket.

It was Restaurant Week in D.C., and after perusing a long list of participating restaurants I chose Belga Café, a Belgian bistro in Eastern Market. Walking through the front doors I felt transported to a modern and lively European kitchen, and with one quick glance at the menu I learned there's much more to Belgian cuisine than waffles and beer (although I sampled plenty of the latter).

Ah, autumn is here - which brings to mind changing leaves, back-to-school sales, and...crab races. Yes, crab races.

Every year on Labor Day weekend, the seaside town of Crisfield, Maryland holds its Annual Hard Crab Derby and Fair. This quaint village of 2,800 on the Chesapeake Bay has a long tradition of catching - and racing - its seafood. The festival is a celebration of the town's fishing heritage, particularly of the abundant (and delicious!) blue crabs that teem in the bay's waters.

Here, you can watch a parade on Main Street, a boat docking contest, a crab picking contest, and the crowning of the beautiful Miss Crustacean. But the main attraction of the festival is its namesake "crab derby," in which hundreds of crabs scramble down a chute to the finish line in a knock-down, drag-out race (okay, so the crabs aren't even aware of the race). The bets - and the crowd's enthusiasm - get intense. Afterward, nothing beats finishing off a fresh platter of crabs steamed with Old Bay spice while taking in views of the water at the Olde Crisfield Crab and Steakhouse. If you're hardy enough, you can top it off with a generous slice of Smith Island cake.

The best way to enjoy the festival is by renting a campsite in nearby Jane's Island State Park, which boasts 3,100 acres of Eastern Maryland's prettiest shoreline. When you need a break from the festivities, quiet kayak trails and beach walks await you in the park. So grab some friends, a tent, and a healthy appetite for crab and you've got one shell of a Labor Day weekend.  

Photo: kathyhaduch via Flickr

Some of my colleagues (I'm talking about you, Norie) got to safari in Africa and traipse around European capitals with their kids this summer, but I only got my act together enough to accomplish two nights in Atlantic City before school started this week.  

The surprise: Despite Atlantic City's rep as a resort town for casinos and nightlife, we had a better experience there with our three-year-old than the first time my husband and I visited on a last-minute weekend whim several years ago B.K. (Before Kid).

Here are some of the top toddler-tested attractions at this Jersey Shore destination.

Rolling Chairs: Introduced in 1887, these chairs pushed by young men and women were a great way to tour Atlantic City's four-mile-long Boardwalk. Go for the vintage-looking wicker chairs. Our chair attendant turned out to be a university student from Romania, where my husband is from, so they chatted away in Romanian. A half-hour tour cost us about $25 (plus Stefan ended up tipping his fellow countryman very generously). Our daughter loved tooling along, saying "beep beep" to pedestrians who wandered into our path, while eating a messy soft-serve ice cream cone from one of the Boardwalk vendors. A magical time to do a tour is at sunset or dusk when the beach is quieter and the light softens.

Friend of IT Lola Akinmade loves pad thai, and gives us the lowdown on where to grab the best in Northern Virginia.

Maybe it's the final sprinkling of crushed peanuts that seals the deal or bean sprouts as the only vegetable in the mix alleviating my guilt, one thing is for sure: whatever magic portion this Thai delicacy wields, it has me completely hooked.

The beauty of living in the Washington, D.C. metro area means you're blessed with instant access to high quality and authentic cuisine from all over the globe right in your backyard. With its sinful stir-fry blend of rice noodles, chili, coriander, fish sauce, egg, and your meat of choice, Pad Thai is the most popular and instantly recognizable Thai dish worldwide. My insatiable need for Pad Thai can be broken down into three distinct scenarios.

Pad Thai for the Journey
It was fate that brought me to Neisha Thai Cuisine in Tyson's Corner. Heavily frequented by native Thai customers, a clear indication of its authenticity, I stumbled upon this gem during a shopping trip. Its location in McLean and proximity to Washington Dulles International airport meant I could indulge in one pleasure, Pad Thai, en-route to observing another pleasure of mine, travel. Now, each time I head to Dulles to catch an international flight, my excitement is two-fold. A quick stop to stock up on enough Pad Thai to last the entire journey, and the journey itself.

As an intern trying to make the most of her summer in the capital, I'm always on the lookout for cool things to see and do. The Smithsonians? Check. Free concerts at the Kennedy Center? I'm there. I'm sure you can imagine my excitement when I was invited to tour the Holy Grail of D.C. destinations, the cherry on top of the Executive sundae--the West Wing of the White House (above).

This is not an opportunity that comes along every day. Tours of the White House's East Wing can be arranged through your representatives in Congress anywhere between six months to 30 days in advance. But the West Wing takes a little something extra. You have to know a White House staffer... so when a friend asked if I'd be interested in seeing where President Obama goes to work every day, I jumped at the chance.

Having seen pretty much every episode of NBC's "The West Wing" ever made, I started out half expecting to run into Leo McGarry in the hallway or pass Mrs. Landingham's desk on my way to see the President. Brace yourself, reader: it's not how it looks on TV. Don't get me wrong, the West Wing is still incredibly cool. But everything, from the corridors to the Oval Office, is a lot smaller than any fictional version of it I've ever seen.
 
Official photos of the President and the First Family covered the walls as we made our way through the hallways, past staffers' closed office doors and at least four guard stations. Every once in a while a new batch of pictures is put up, and the old ones make their way into people's offices.
 
For all that it doesn't look the same as in the movies, once in a while we passed something instantly recognizable: the Rose Garden, the Cabinet Room, and finally, the Oval Office. I'm not going to lie: it's pretty awesome to look up and realize you're standing in front of a place you've been seeing in pictures your entire life.

Last week I took our two kids, Chase and Mackenzie, for an inexpensive and easy escape to Maryland's Eastern Shore. Unlike Martha's Vineyard or the Hamptons, it's short on celebrities and long on cornfields and regular folks--a bucolic place to play out the last days of summer. Here are some scenes from my Chesapeake Bay diary.

Day 1: There's a secret stretch of sand that few but the locals know. Beside the boat launch and ferry dock for the Oxford Bellevue Ferry is a sandy quarter-mile strip that's usually all yours (with a jungle gym and swings 50 yards away). We swim cautiously with an eye out for jellyfish, but mostly we play in the sand. The kids bury me up to my chin. We hunt shells, build sandcastles, and look for crabs. We take the nation's oldest privately operated ferry to Oxford, a quaint little town with a park near the Tred Avon River where the kids feed most of their lunch to the birds.

Day 2: Chase is fixated on crabs and each morning, first thing, he goes to the end of the nearby dock and helps me haul up crab pots. He pokes the crabs with a finger, squealing with excitement when they give him a nip, and makes me promise to take him for a crab dinner.  Later in the day we head to the Crab Claw, a rustic restaurant on the St. Michaels' wharf that's been around since the mid-'60s. They tape sheets of paper on picnic tables and serve heaps of crabs, clams, oysters -- a very messy affair and the kids love it. As I suspected, they want nothing to do with actually eating a crab. Instead, they gorge on chicken nuggets and fries--and feed oyster crackers to the ducks that jockey in the water near our feet. The day ends with cotton candy ice cream at the St. Michaels Candy Company.

Despite having been born and raised on the East Coast and spending most of my adult life in its major cities (Philly, New York, and finally, D.C.), I'd never been to Ocean City, MD, before last weekend when I hung around there with my husband and his family.
   
My mom's a big beach-goer and is pretty particular on her sunning spots. I may dare say she's a beach purist. She likes broad expanses of sand; spindly egrets; tufted, virgin dunes; and minimal crowds. Her favorite beach spot along "the shore" (what we Pennsylvanians and New Jersyians call the Jersey shore) is Cape May, NJ. She prefers it for its busy but manageable beach and homey snack shops but mostly for its well-maintained, brilliantly hued Victorian homes, most turned into lucrative B&Bs. I respect her high standards and now see they're probably why I'd never before been to Ocean City, MD.
   
Having said all of that, I didn't expect much from Ocean City as we arrived and finally extracted ourselves from our too-hot car after four hours on the road from D.C. It was busy and commercial and built up. It smelled too strong of the vinegar doused generously on the ever-popular boardwalk fries. I looked around, went for a dip, sat with the family, watched the world go by, and had two pepperoni slices and a cold beer. It was a fine day but considering Ocean City through the lens of what we at IT and Traveler espouse--authentic, cultural, and sustainable travel--I thought Ocean City fell short. But did it?

Historical figures often define a city, their presences lingering long after their deaths. Nowhere is this more the case than in Washington, D.C. Here, you can't avoid history and the legacy of America's great men. I mean, there's a giant white needle in the middle of the city to commemorate our first founding father. You can't miss it even if you try.

A large part of my summer in D.C. has been shaped by one of these great men: Thomas Jefferson. It all started when my grandpa found out I would be in D.C. this summer and sent me his copy of Jefferson's Bible. Yes, it's a real book. Jefferson took issue with the Gospels, considering the authors to be uneducated and to have written them too long after Jesus' death, so he examined a Latin, Greek, French, and English version of the four books of the Bible (aside: Jefferson spoke six languages; legend has it that he learned Spanish on the three week boat trip from America to Spain), and cut and pasted what he liked into a new version of the Gospels.

I sent my grandpa a thank you note, telling him I would return the book upon finishing it and expressing my interest to learn more about Jefferson. Instead, he told me to keep the book and sent me another: a biography of the third president--a compilation of excerpts from letters he had written--that my grandpa had bought when he and his wife had stopped at Monticello on their RV trip across the United States. So, I decided to learn more about the man my grandpa called "a genius, albeit with some human frailties."

First stop: the beautiful Thomas Jefferson Building in the Library of Congress (above), which has an ongoing exhibit on the second floor featuring the books around which the great library developed. When the British burned the Capitol in 1814, the entire Congressional Library was destroyed. Jefferson could relate because when his family home, Shadwell, burned in 1770, he grieved the loss of his books more than anything. So, in a controversial move, he sold his personal library to Congress for $23,950 in 1815. This original library has been restored in the exhibit, with Jefferson's books catalogued in an order he described as "sometimes analytical, sometimes chronological, and sometimes a combination of both." Based on Francis Bacon's method, he divided his books into three categories--Memory, Reason, and Imagination (which included History, Philosophy, and Fine Arts)--and from there, into 44 smaller categories. Two thousand original books remain, while those ruined by fire and wear have been replaced with different versions of the same edition.

Here at Traveler, we love digging through the archive of photographs available to us at National Geographic to learn about the history of a place and see how it's changed over time (see our recent photo galleries on Yellowstone, Yosemite, and Kodachrome Culture for examples). We present a "Then and Now" photo feature in every issue, and have even dedicated an entire photo issue to looking at how the places we love have changed. So with that in mind, I was particularly taken with a photo set I stumbled upon on Flickr where the photographer, Jason Powell, aligned old photos in their contemporary settings. The collection, called "Looking into the Past" is culled primarily from images from the Library of Congress, and were reassembled in the area around D.C. and Virginia. He's right, they open a window into the past that's just fascinating. Powell says he was inspired by the "Souvenirs" series of images created by Michael Hughes, and also on Flickr. Both sets are great, and help us look at familiar places with a new light. Check out more images from "Looking into the Past" after the jump.

When you think of Williamsburg, Virginia, a lively culinary scene is probably not the first thing that comes to mind. Strolling down Williamsburg's Duke of Gloucester Street, with its understated colonial houses and interpreters clad in period dress, it's hard to imagine that walking just ten minutes further will bring you to the doorstep of a restaurant where you can order foie gras and pan-seared scallops. But you can--and should. Beth Lizardo recently returned from a long weekend in Virginia's Historic Triangle--composed of Williamsburg, Jamestown and Yorktown--and is still longing for some of the food she tasted during the trip. From biscuits and grits to broiled Norwegian salmon, the chefs in Virginia's Historic Triangle know how to cook food that you will not soon forget. Here's a rundown of some of her favorite eats.

Dudley's Farmhouse Grille

When chef Jim Kennedy opened Dudley's Farmhouse Grille in 2007, he set out to create a restaurant where locals could come and enjoy the freshest fare possible. "I envisioned going back to how I was trained to cook. You bought everything fresh. You went to local farmers," Kennedy explains. And this is exactly what he does. Kennedy is a regular at the local farmer's market and keeps an herb garden right outside the restaurant. The basil in Kennedy's caprese salad appetizer--oversized, intensely fragrant basil--comes from this garden. And he won't let you leave without trying his wife's homemade crème brûlé made with local eggs. Other items, such as the Southern-style grilled alligator entrée special, have traveled a little farther to make it onto the Dudley's menu, however.  

Affectionately named after Kennedy's dog, Dudley, the restaurant is a small business set in a1905 farmhouse. "Our kitchen is tiny," admits Kennedy. "We have two cooks and one dishwasher. It's like working on a train." The quaintness of the farmhouse setting is accentuated by its out-of-the-way location, which is in the town of Toano, located just off Route 60 about 25 minutes outside of Williamsburg.

We arrive at Dudley's while it's still light enough to admire the old wooden farm tables and local art--some for sale and some on loan from Kennedy's personal collection--hanging on the walls. As the evening progresses and the sun sets, the servers light candles and the dining room assumes a soft yellow glow. Throughout our meal Kennedy makes frequent visits to our table to sit down and chat. He talks about dishes he's served in the past (lavender-rubbed lamb; scallop and red pepper soup), about the ghost that haunts the upstairs level of the farmhouse, and about his three-year-old daughter who only eats gourmet. By the end of the meal it's clear that Dudley's is armed with much more than good food--it's armed with indisputable character.

Dudley's Farmhouse Grille, 7816 Richmond Rd, Toana, VA. +1 757 566 1157; www.dudleysfarmhousegrille.com