I received the message from the revolutionary agent who, despite her 18th century dress and speech, had no time for period delivery services. When America’s freedom is at stake, and the park is closing in a few hours, we patriots cannot idle the hourglass waiting for a carrier pigeon or a horseback-riding courier.

I stood on the deck of the houseboat with a boa constrictor draped around my neck. Her tongue rapaciously darting in and out, the snake slithered down my arm. Then, unexpectedly, she turned to look at me, and her head began maneuvering back towards my face.

Anyone who has ever hugged a teddy bear has sampled some of the legacy of Theodore Roosevelt, the United States’ “conservation president.”

Ask the people who cook in Atlanta to sum up the post-recession dining scene, and you hear things like this from one of its shining lights: “We’re building confidence,” says Billy Allin, the chef-owner of the destination Cakes & Ale.

Derrick, our garrulous tour guide, offers a biriba, a prickly looking pod he’s cut open to expose a pale and pulpy fruit, as well as some peer pressure.“What’s the matter?” he asks.“Don’t you want to live forever?”

Even at the tender age of 18, I was smitten with Providence’s charming and historic East Side, particularly mile-long Benefit Street, still touted by tourism officials as “the most impressive concentration of original colonial homes in America.” But way back then, in the summer of 1972, the advice had been universal: “Stay away from downtown,” a blight-stricken, commercial-industrial hodge-podge all too reminiscent of my native Cleveland.

My epiphany comes the moment I realize our “log” boat is about to plunge headfirst down the steep water slide. “This is awe-soooome!” my 7-year-old daughter screams as we go over. I just scream.

Women in feathers danced some sort of crazy mating ritual to Southern tunes — vying, I was told, for the honored title of Buzzard Queen. Then there was the 70-something-year-old man in the loin cloth and tails wearing a Buzzard Queen Inspector button and, around his neck, a Perfect Woman Meter.

I see her as I step out from among the sea grape trees and onto the golden sands: tanned, blond and bikini-clad, she is walking toward me. And she possesses the one characteristic I’m yearning to see in a woman on the beach: a little kid.

When “bouquet” and “beer” appear in the same sentence, you know these aren’t the hills of hillbillies.

These days, Philadelphia’s restaurants rival its storied sports franchises, with culinary stars arriving from New York, San Francisco and other dining capitals, amid rampant speculation about who might be the next hot toque in town.

We were sitting at a high top in Florida’s oldest microbrewery, which happens to be in the unhurried and unheralded town of Dunedin.

Strange as it may sound, finding good Dominican food isn’t so easy in Dominican restaurants.

The tobacco and textile industries left their imprint on Durham long ago, but now the historic brick mills and repurposed factories form the backdrop of North Carolina’s re-energized Bull City. Recently, artist studios and upstart galleries have multiplied in the flourishing downtown area, where new bakeries, pizzerias, tapas bars and food trucks — and trailers and buses and even the odd tricycle — seem to surface at every turn. Since Big Tobacco is dead, consider this cool mix of culture and food the new Durham blend.

There’s no sign out front, so my mom and I trust our instincts — and the smell of fresh sawdust — to guide us as we pull off the dirt road and approach the weathered workshop. We’re in search of an authentic Amish-made rocking chair, and judging from the woodworking tools and gently curved rocker bottoms propped against the doorway, we’re in luck.

There was a time, not that long ago, when visitors to Puerto Rico’s second-largest city were cautioned not to stray from the central plaza after dark. Many of Ponce’s ornate 19th century buildings were vacant and falling to pieces, and the poorly lit streets were made even shadier by some of the characters who roamed them looking for handouts — or worse.

I was in Portland all of 10 minutes when its soul rolled by on two wheels: a gentleman pedaling through downtown on one of those ridiculously tall bicycles with an oversize front wheel and tiny back wheel.

For a certain kind of traveler, no visit to a new city is complete without a bellyful of local culinary delights.

Houston isn’t exactly what you’d call a “looker.” This is apparent as I enjoy my last lunch in the city seated on the patio at Revival Market, a cafe and gourmet grocer in the Heights, a residential neighborhood north of downtown.

Can you get a decent hotel room in Manhattan for under $150 a night?

At 12:45 on a Wednesday, the formal dining room at Aquagrill is crazy busy, with nearly every seat occupied by a business lunch crowd. No surprise, since the 2011 edition of Zagat rated the place the best raw bar in New York. Luckily, we’ve thought to make a reservation.

It goes without saying that The Lady and Sons is one of Paula Deen’s favorite places here. It’s the restaurant that propelled her to her first cookbook and to Food Network stardom. It’s also the place where the careers of her sons, Jamie and Bobby, were launched.

I walked through a gigantic mouth into a chamber where, besides seeing a life-size skeleton and identifying things by touch and smell, I learned fun facts through hands-on exhibits about burping, peeing and flatulence.

There’s relaxing, and then there’s liming. You’ll know — and feel — the difference after a few hours in St. Kitts.

Blue grass, roving minstrels, fiery potions, peanut-butter breezes, dancing zombies, symbol-encrusted loaves of bread: This is either a hallucination or a day in the park. Specifically, Cheapside Park, the public square in Lexington, Ky.

Traveling on a budget doesn’t mean you have to give up on all the best stuff a city has to offer.

My po’boy is a hot mess. The spicy smoked sausage, slicked by its own fireball-orange grease, is determined to slide out the sides of the Leidenheimer loaf. The links are further lubricated by two types of mustard (yellow and Creole) and a slather of chili that ramps up the ooze factor. By the time I’m done with my sandwich at Domilise’s Po-Boy & Bar, I’ve gone through at least a dozen napkins.

The fully furnished American Georgian exudes 18th century elegance, from the grand stairway to ornate moldings to exquisite white thornwood mirror frames. And everything works: The locks lock, the fully dovetailed drawers slide, the window shutters open and close.

“Advertising,” mystic Thomas Merton wrote, “treats all products with the reverence and the seriousness due to sacraments.”

Tucked into a corner of the wall above a stairway leading to the third floor of the Corbit-Sharp House is a tiny doorway. In 1845, the cubby hole behind this door sheltered a runaway slave named Sam. When the local sheriff came looking for the runaway, the lady of the house, Mary Corbit, led him right up to the stairway. As she had hoped, the sheriff couldn’t imagine that the space behind the door was large enough to shelter a human being, so he turned away to continue his search throughout the rest of the house. Corbit’s daughter, Mary Warner, recalled years later that her mother said that her heart was beating so loudly, she feared that it would give her secret away.