Travel Classrooms

Your guide– a volcanologist and professor at the University of Hawaii– will meet you at the Volcanoes National Park visitor center for a guided adventure in the park. Witness firsthand the dynamic processes through which cinder cones, glowing pit craters, lava rivers and fountains of splatter are formed.  Your guide will explain how Big Island actually consists of five volcanoes as part of a volcanic chain of islands created over a 70-million-year period by the northwestward movement of the ocean floor over a fixed hot spot in the Earth’s mantle.  

Embark on a guided tour of Atlanta’s civil rights history with a civil rights activist who served as the driver and personal assistant to Dr. King and his family from 1966 until his assassination in 1968. Once the youngest member of the SCLC executive staff, your guide’s impressive resume includes participating in the famed 1965 Selma to Montgomery March, numerous arrests for non-violent civil disobedience demonstrations and a long and storied career of activism, politics and journalism. During this intimate experience, you will have the opportunity to learn about your guide’s fascinating life while touring some of  Atlanta’s most important civil rights sites, including the houses where Dr. King was born and lived at the time of his assassination, the church he co-pastored with his father, the mural of John Lewis on Auburn Avenue and the office on Auburn Avenue where MLK, Abernathy, Andrew Young and Hosea Williams made decisions that changed the world. At some point during your tour, you may stop at a local lunch counter to meet some of the local folks that also participated in the movement and grab a little Southern soul cooking. 

Join an expert local historian today for a guided tour of Charlottesville. Tour the grounds of Monticello, President Thomas Jefferson’s regal plantation estate, and take a peek inside. Enjoy lunch at a historic tavern, then continue with a stroll amongst the University of Virginia’s picturesque buildings and unique gardens. 

Meet with your astronaut guide for a private tour of the National Air and Space Museum. A veteran of four space shuttle missions, he will provide insight into the Apollo moon gallery, which features an Apollo capsule, lunar spacesuits, moon rocks, the lunar rover, and more. Continue on to view the Space Shuttle gallery to view the early Mercury and Gemini capsules and some of the world’s first rocket planes. Walk through the Skylab Space Station to see the Hubble Space Telescope, Russian Soyuz capsules and spacesuits, Spaceship One and the Wright brothers’ Wright Flyer. To commemorate your experience, your guide will give you a signed copy of his autobiography, which details his second space shuttle mission.  

Learn the ins-and-outs of the US government with a former Congressman on an insider tour of Capitol Hill that includes rooms not normally open to the public. Listen to firsthand accounts of what it's like to work in the Capitol and learn how the branches of government work together to create the policy that governs the citizens of the United States of America.