Not every park in the United States national park system is as large as the grand canyon. This unassuming house outside of Boston is the original Kennedy compound and in this house future president Kennedy was born. The house takes less than a half hour to tour. And in another half hour for the film that they show about Kennedy and you can easily add a visit to this park to a day in Boston.

John F. Kennedy NHS preserves the birthplace of America’s 35th president. In 1967, the president’s mother returned here, where Kennedy spent his boyhood, and restored the house to her recollection of its 1917 appearance. Each year, thousands of visitors join NPS staff to share Mrs. Kennedy’s memories in a tour of the house and neighborhood that, in her words, hold “many happy memories.”

The tires spun but the car slowly lost all forward momentum and started sliding backwards back into the darkness. I put on the brakes and that slowed but did not stop the backwards decline. I had been dreading this moment for a few days. After an occasionally white knuckle experience driving on Crete it was the parking garage for the last hotel that looked like it had defeated me.

Our first challenge with driving on Crete was navigation. We had taken the ferry into Heraklion and had a rental car dropped off the next morning at the hotel. With some creative double parking by the rental car agent that went without incident. We drove to the ruins of the palace of Knossos north of Heraklion without incident. Since the car was dropped off with an almost empty tank we did have to find a gas station before going to far.

It was the return trip through Heraklion that vexed us. We followed the signs to the national highway but soon found our selves in unmarked streets and alleys in Heraklion. I have a very good sense of direction but the roads did not seem to go where we wanted to go. Finally I started following cars more or less at random like the main character in Douglas Adam’s Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency. I would pick the larger road that seemed to head north and west until we finally found the national highway.

The national highway towards Rethymno had its own set of challenges. The highway is a wonderfully newly paved two lane road. That is to say that it is striped as a two lane road with one lane in each direction. It is driven as a four lane road. When you are not passing you drive with your right tire, and occasionally your left tire as well, to the right of the white stripe marking the right shoulder. There is nothing quite as invigorating as the adrenaline rush that comes from seeing a truck coming at you mostly in your lane.

The people of Crete decorate the highways with small shrines to the drivers who failed this driving test. The shrines are small recreations of Greek orthodox churches decorated with flowers and other reminders of the unfortunate driver. As a Lamborghini passed me while strattling the center line I wondered if the small Lutheran church that they might put up upon my demise would look out of place.

After surviving all of that, I found myself sliding backwards down the incredibly steep ramp of the hotel’s parking garage. Parking garages in old European towns and I don’t always get along. I was a passenger when a former boss took out the side of a VW Westfalia in a parking garage in Bremen Germany. I had nearly done the same trick on more than one occasion. Just last Summer it smelled like I burned out a clutch escaping the clutches of a similar steep and cramped garage in Nice France.

My wife and daughter got out of the car and wished me luck as I took on the ramp one more time. After a running start I found the escape velocity of the garage in Chania. My legs shook for 5 minutes with the dose of adrenaline that my body thought might help with the situation. I had conquered driving in Crete and would live to tell of the experience.

When a friend was in town recently and we drove up to San Francisco. When we strolled around Chinatown we stopped at the Golden Gate Fortune Cookie Factory. Now factory may bring up the wrong picture in your head. This small business located off an alley in Chinatown is not for the claustrophobic. It has room for two fortune cookie making stations, a woman who takes the money for cookies or pictures (taking a picture costs $1) and about 6 customers. It is interesting watching the process of the cookies being made. A machine creates and backs a series of circular cookies. A worker then grabs a fortune and folds the still warm cookie over a metal bar.

The factory is between Grant and Stockton. Grant Avenue is where most people go to in Chinatown, but the heart of the real Chinatown is a block to the west on Stockton Street. On Stockton you will find food markets selling live turtles, live fish, and vegetables that you might not normally see at your local corner grocery. So next time you are in Chinatown get off the beaten path. Try a fresh cookie or a bean pastry filled pasty from a local bakery. We all enjoyed the experience although there were some differences of opinion between my wife and I about how how good a fortune “a new pair of shoes will do you a world of good” is.

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An article in the USA Today called “10 great places to check into movie-hotel history” got me thinking about how much my family (especially my son Mike who is now a film student) have enjoyed the times when our love for movies and our love of travel has intersected.

The DVD for You’ve Got Mail has a tour of the Upper West Side of Manhattan. Zabars, Grey’s Papaya, Cafe Lalo took on a whole new meaning when they are seen not just as interesting places but as sets.

Kauai is not just an island in the Hawaiian Islands, it is where they filmed Jurassic Park. Each valley takes on a whole new look as imaginary dinosaurs run through them.

And the crowning experience for us was when we ran into a film crew on the streets of Sydney, Australia filming a car chase stunt from the film Superman Returns. We watched for hours as they setup the stunt. A car was heading through the pedestrian mall outside of the Metropolis Museum (it was the banners for the museum that first caught our eye) jumping off of a series of steps (and landing in a pile of cardboard boxes). Extras and stunt people were rehearsed. This was not a stunt they wanted to do twice. What took seconds in the film took hours to film.

By the way, the picture at the top of the article is the The Plaza New York.

Overlooking Central Park, the distinctive Plaza — built in 1907 and currently undergoing a $400 million renovation — is a familiar movie star. “Paul Hogan as Crocodile Dundee figured out the function of the bidet here, and Dudley Moore entertained working girls in the hotel’s famous Oak Bar in Arthur,” Reeves says. “But my favorite Plaza scene is the abduction of Cary Grant from the hotel’s lobby in Alfred Hitchcock’s classic North by Northwest.”

Picture this, you are minding your own business as a tourist on the streets London when suddenly and without warning the crowd around you stops moving, freezing in place.

The day London froze. Inspired by Improv Everywhere and made a reality by 100’s of volunteers. At exactly 3:30pm on a secret cue, almost everyone in the square froze. The few bewildered tourists didn’t know what was happening. For 5 minutes the participants held their positions, and then magically everyone unfroze.