There's a quiet beach where a French child plays,
Among sand dunes as the peaceful ocean whispers:
Enjoy this sunny day, mon enfant, but think of youths
Who were but a few years older than you
When they bought this beach with their blood.

Here are bits of personal D.C. history from a really old guy. Just one week after the Pearl Harbor attack in December 1941, our school sent us on a senior class trip to Washington. We stayed at the Mayflower, now the Renaissance Mayflower. I don't know what the room rates were, probably a luxurious $15 a night, but four boys were stashed in each.

What's my clearest memory of the trip? As we were herded through the various monuments and government buildings, we could see soldiers on the rooftops wearing World War I helmets and manning obviously outdated 1918 machine guns. How those few guys could have protected the city from an invading army or fought off air raids, Washington residents fortunately never had to find out.

Located on Italy’s Bay of Naples, Pompeii is an excavated city that takes visitors back 20 centuries to see how ordinary people lived until a horrific moment in 79 A.D., when the nearby volcano of Mount Vesuvius totally destroyed the town almost instantaneously with burning lava and ashes.

If you want a real cool summer vacation, fly, drive or cruise to Alaska. We mean really cool. The northern part of the state, although great for fantastic scenery and is close to the Arctic, never really gets warm enough for sunning and swimming. However, the middle and southern areas often have daylight temperatures in the 70s in July and August.

Another advantage of a summer vacation in Alaska, the land of the midnight sun, is that daylight can last 20 to 22 hours. This allows more time for hiking, kayaking, fishing, riding the river rapids, sightseeing, mountain climbing, glacier viewing, skiing, animal watching and every other fun activity.