The Smithsonian Institution is adding weekend packages to its 20-year-old Study Tours travel program. These four American Snapshots are excursions to Amelia Island, Fla.; Holmes County, Ohio; southeast Wisconsin; and Puget Sound, Wash.
The tour of Amelia Island, off northern Florida’s Atlantic coast, in April is accompanied by the founder of the Amelia Island Museum of History, Deon Jaccard, and its director, Ron Kurtz. Victorian, Queen Anne, Italianate and Colonial Revival homes of the island are visited, and participants stay in a bed-and-breakfast in the historic district of the main town, Fernandina Beach. The trip is April 16 to 19. The cost of $775 is, as for all the tours, per person based on double occupancy, and includes all meals and ground transportation, but not air fare.
Southeast Wisconsin, a region settled by European immigrants from 30 nations, will be visited May 7 to 10. A cultural historian accompanies this tour of Wisconsin’s Ethnic Settlement Trail, which samples the cuisine, music and art of this area. The price, $895, includes a stay at the American Club, a hotel on the National Register of Historic Places.
The Puget Sound tour includes two nights in the Victorian town of Port Townsend, once an international seaport, on the tip of the Olympic peninsula. The tour, Sept. 24 to 27, will be accompanied by a history professor and will visit seaside villages and restored military forts, with ferry rides between some of the more than 300 islands of Puget Sound. The cost is $855.
The fourth excursion, to Holmes County, Ohio, which has the largest settlement of Amish in the world, is sold out.
Participation in the tours requires Smithsonian Institution membership ($24 a year). For more details, call 202-357-4700.
