Welcome to your guide to factory tours!

The scintillating island of Puerto Rico is a U.S. possession to be treasured. If you are planning a warm getaway there this winter, soak up some local flavors at the Casa Bacardi Visitor Center in the town of Cataño. Glowing with palm trees, other tropical flora, and well-manicured grounds, this lush 127-acre estate is the home of the Bacardi rum empire. Tour the visitor center with a headset and audio guide to learn about the company's colorful history and the intricate process of making rum. Afterwards, chill in the lounge for a cocktail demonstration and samples. Want more details? See our full writeup of the Bacardi tour in the pages of Watch It Made in the U.S.A.

If the fall nights are turning chilly where you live, you may be thinking about new energy-saving windows to keep in your heat and keep out the cold this winter. While researching the latest edition of Watch It Made, we learned all about Andersen Windows and its factory tour in Bayport, Minnesota. The company produces many types of windows and doors, including energy-saving varieties. That makes the tour interesting enough. However, for factory-tour buffs like us, it's also fascinating just to see how the Andersen workers spend their days.

Windows have long symbolized clear understanding, so it is fitting that Andersen gives visitors an unusually close look at its manufacturing operation. The tour brings you right to the heart of the process. From the lumberyard, pine wood arrives from various timber sources and enters the cutting and milling area. As you stand nearby, inhaling the wholesome smell of fresh pine, computer-controlled machinery cuts the lumber into planks in a continuous flow that handles 100 million board feet (or square feet) of wood a year.

Next you see (and hear) the noisy area of the ripsaw. This huge cutting machine sections planks of lumber into usable pieces that are then sorted by size and quality (or "grade"). From the ripsaw and automatic sorters, the wood travels at 400 feet a minute to the staging areas. Stacked and tallied, the pieces await processing. In the milling area, you meet the Mattison and Weinig molders. These machines shape the wood into stiles, the vertical parts of a window sash, and rails, the horizontal parts. The last stop on the tour is the final assembly line where Andersen's workers put together windows and patio doors. Each shift in the 24-hour working day produces between 800 and 1,000 units. As you stand among the workers, you can sense the amiable solidarity that defines the company culture of Andersen Windows.

While you're in Minnesota, enjoying the fall colors, bring a copy of Watch It Made in the U.S.A. to find other factory tours you can take in the region.

Whether motivated by the environmental benefits of growing and transporting food locally, or by the simple love of fresh ingredients, the interest in local sources of food among Americans is rapidly growing. If checking the labels of origin at your supermarket isn't enough for you, consider taking a farm tour this summer. Many farms, both large and small, offer tours of their agricultural operations (with lots of tasty free samples), and there is probably one near you. Here we present an example plucked right from the pages of Watch It Made: Wiebe Farms in Reedley, California, located in the famous growing region known as the Central Valley.

Wiebe Farms is, specifically, in the San Joaquin Valley, the southern half of the Central Valley. This is among the most productive agricultural regions in the world. Hot summers, moist winters, and rich soil make it ideal for the cultivation of many fruits and vegetables. As you drive through it on ruler-straight roads, lush fields and orchards stretch in all directions.

Since founder Louis Wiebe planted his first orchard in 1956, Wiebe Farms has grown peaches, plums, and nectarines. Starting at the barn, tours show you the fields for a lesson in the cultivation of fruit trees. Grafted from mature specimens, young trees are planted by hand in straight rows. As the trees grow, expert pruners shape them every winter into a form that yields the best amount, quality, and size of fruit. Each generation of trees lives about 15 years. The farm rotates the orchards continually, so you can see all stages of the trees' development.

Harvest time at Wiebe runs from mid-May to mid-September—so now is the prime time for free samples of fruit on the tour! Balanced on their aluminum ladders, the farm's experienced pickers have a keen sense of what fruit is ready for eating and what must still develop. The difference can be too subtle for the untrained eye.

Then technology takes over. Ripe produce moves in bins to the packing shed, which buzzes with machinery and busy staff. After unloading the fruit, employees wash it and treat it to retard decay; graders reject fruit that is not up to USDA standards. A conveyor belt passes the approved produce by a camera that sends images to a computer which sorts it by size and color. Another machine adorns the fruit with PLU (product lookup) stickers. Finally, a conveyor belt whisks the fruit to the packing department. You can contemplate the whole process while you munch on free fresh peaches and nectarines.

This is just one of several farms that you can find interspersed among the factory tours in Watch It Made in the U.S.A. Others exist in New England, Michigan, Washington (state), New Mexico, and even Hawaii. Obviously, summer is often the best time to visit a farm, but many give tours throughout the year. See our book for more information!

No manufacturing operation in the world is more ambitious than the NASA space program; so naturally, as factory tour mavens, we were thrilled by our recent visit to the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. NASA's major "spaceport" on Cape Canaveral is, after all, quite possibly the biggest of all the factory tours in our book Watch It Made in the U.S.A. Visitors get a detailed view of our past, present, and future technology for propelling astronauts into orbit, to the moon, and perhaps even to Mars.

In addition to spacecraft exhibits and two IMAX cinemas, the Kennedy Space Center and Visitor Complex offers a basic tour with numerous exhibits included in the general admission, along with special tours that require separate tickets. Leaving by bus from the Visitor Complex, the basic tour is available every 15 minutes and makes three stops (allow up to three hours for the tour).

The first stop, Launch Complex 39 (LC 39), is close to where the space shuttles take off. You can climb up the observation platform, rising 60 feet high, for a view of the two immense launch pads and a close look at a main shuttle engine. From the platform you can also peer back at the Launch Control Center and the vast Vehicle Assembly Building, the largest single-story building in the world (your tour bus passes close to this near the first stop). Shuttles awaiting launch may be visible in the distance.

The second stop is the Apollo/Saturn V Center. This cavernous facility preserves memories of the Apollo program, which culminated in the moon landings. Here you learn about the early space program and watch an exciting big-screen video of the Mission Control firing room during the Apollo 8 mission. From the turquoise rafters to the exhibits on the ground, you will see a lunar module, a rover training vehicle, and many other relics of the Apollo program. The centerpiece is one of the original giant Saturn V rockets, the size of a building.

The third stop is the facility where NASA prepares parts of the International Space Station (ISS). You can walk through an actual-size mockup of the interiors where astronauts will work and sleep. From the observation gallery, you see the processing floor where components of the space station are assembled.

The Astronaut Training Experience (ATX) is a special all-day interactive program that lets you sample the rigors that NASA crews must endure to prepare for missions (this program involves additional cost). The day also includes a general tour of Kennedy Space Center, simulators, and a simulated space-shuttle mission. Because the ATX is physically interactive, special requirements apply: call for details.

While that special tour costs extra, we found a nice free bonus with general admission to the Kennedy Space Center: admission to the U.S. Astronaut Hall of Fame (six miles west) is included.

For more details about the Kennedy Space Center and other fun tours in central Florida, see our book Watch It Made in the U.S.A.