Take Two and Lovely Cruise (with Eli and Skipper aboard) spent a week at Dry Tortugas National Park, anchored near Fort Jefferson, a Civil War-Era Brick fort about 70 miles west of Key West. It was used as a prison, and this is an essay about its most famous prisoner.

On April 14, 1865, during a play at Ford’s Theatre, John Wilkes Booth shot President Lincon in the head. Did anyone conspire with Booth in the assassination plot? Perhaps we will never know for sure, but he certainly had help afterward. After firing his gun, Booth jumped off the balcony and broke his leg. He got away and ran to the house of Dr. Samuel A. Mudd, who set his leg and let him rest. Booth snuck away in the early hours of the morning with his friend David Herald but when federal agents searched for Booth at Mudd’s house, he said he did not know who or where Booth was, though it has been established that the two men knew each other from previous meetings. When they found Booth and Herald in a barn at Garret’s farm, Herald surrendered but Booth resisted arrest, so they set fire to the barn and later shot Booth, killing him and destroying any chance of finding out his secrets.

Back in Washington D.C., eight conspirators, people who knew Booth or had helped him in some way, were questioned and tried in a military court. They were all found guilty and four were hanged, including the first woman ever to be executed in the United States. Four were sent to prison and one escaped. Dr. Mudd was given a life sentence to be carried out at Fort Jefferson on Garden Key in the Dry Tortugas. Mudd ended up only serving four years because he was pardoned by President Andrew Johnson in 1869, after heroically treating patients during a severe yellow fever outbreak at the fort. When visiting Dry Tortugas National Park, you can still see the cell of Samuel A. Mudd, the famous doctor who set the leg of the man who killed the 16th president of the United States of America.

How do bananas grow? I learned the answer to this question at the Bunches of Fun Banana Farm Tour in Belize.

Well, first the farmer plants seeds or small banana plants. It works both ways. They require a lot of water because their trunks are made of channels full of water. Banana plants need good soil, so farmers re-use old tree trunks, bananas, and leaves chopped up to make a mulch. They need warmth and sunlight, which is why they grow well in Central America.

The plant grows rapidly. A banana flower begins to grow. What is growing under each petal? A hand of bananas! Each banana is called a finger, and many hands make a bunch. Each plant produces only one bunch during its life.

The farmer protects the bananas from bugs. The two small bananas at the bottom are sacrificial bananas that protect the rest of the bunch from fungus.

After the bananas are full grown, the bunch is harvested. The farmer uses paper and plastic to protect the bananas from latex, a gooey brown sap that stains the bananas and makes them hard to sell. The bananas ride a kind of zip-line or cable to a large building where they are washed, cut, and sorted, then packed very tightly in boxes. Then they get loaded into containers and go by truck to a big ship. They are stored at 58 degrees Fahrenheit to keep them from ripening too quickly.

Once a banana plant has produced a bunch of bananas, they chop it down. However, a daughter plant is already growing right next to the old stem, starting a new cycle of life.

My favorite part of the tour was at the end, when we got to eat some fried green bananas, which are better than potato chips!