As Good As Being There

Fort Sumter - Charleston, SC

Fort Sumter, located in Charleston, South Carolina, harbor, was named after General Thomas Sumter. However, the fort is best known as the site where the shots initiating the American Civil War were fired, at the Battle of Fort Sumter.

Fort Sumter was built after the War of 1812 as one of a series of fortifications on the southern U.S. coast. Construction began in 1829, using some slave labor, and the structure was unfinished in 1860, when the drama began. Seventy thousand tons of granite were imported from New England to build up a sand bar in the entrance to Charleston harbor, which the site dominates. The fort was a five-sided (although not a perfect pentagon) brick structure, 170 to 190 feet long, with walls five feet thick, standing 50 feet over the low tide mark. It was designed to house 650 men and 135 guns in three tiers of gun emplacements, although it was never filled near capacity.

Today, administered by the U.S. National Park Service, Fort Sumter is a popular tourist attraction, reached by a thirty-minute boat ride from Charleston.

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Official website 

Grand Canyon - AZ

The Grand Canyon is a colorful, steep-sided gorge, carved by the Colorado River, in northern Arizona. The canyon is one of the seven natural wonders of the world and is largely contained in the Grand Canyon National Park — one of the first national parks in the United States.

The canyon is about 277 miles (446 km) long, ranges in width from 4 to 18 miles (6 to 29 kilometers) and attains a depth of more than a mile (1,600 m).

Aside from casual sightseeing from the South Rim (averaging 7000 feet/2134 m above sea level), whitewater rafting and hiking are especially popular. The floor of the valley is accessible by hiking, muleback, or by boat or raft from upriver. Commercially organized rafting trips, using 35-foot, 15 person "baloney boats" equipped with outboard engines, make the trip from Lee's Ferry to Diamond Creek in about six days while 18-foot rafts and dories powered only with oars and paddles, and take over two weeks to complete the journey. Sightseers are also carried over the canyon by helicopter.

In 1963, author and backpacker Colin Fletcher became the first man to walk the length of Grand Canyon National Park entirely within the rim of the canyon, as chronicled in his bestselling memoir The Man Who Walked Through Time.

Satellite view - via Google Maps
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In the News - via Google News
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Official website

Alcatraz Island – San Francisco Bay, CA

Out in the middle of the San Francisco Bay, the island of Alcatraz is a world unto itself.  Isolation, one of the constants of island life for any inhabitant - soldier, guard, prisoner, Indian, bird or plant - is a recurrent theme in the unfolding history of Alcatraz.

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Official website