For the first time since November of 2019, we’re back on foreign soil! A deep gratitude to God and many thanks to the medical researchers, policy makers, and common people’s best efforts to get us to this point. Thank you, all!

It took a little time to clear customs and get our rental car at the airport, but by about 8:30, we were underway in our yellow Kia. It is almost brand new, and has a million features even my 2015 car doesn’t have – hybrid engine, push start, automatic lights, automatic washers, lane detectors, and many other things I don’t even know about. Renting a car is series of happy accidents with controls for some time.

We drove about an hour and forty-five minutes north to the small town of Borgarnes. We certainly got a taste of traveling in Iceland – we drove from mist to rain to mist to rain to cloudy (which was a happy progression for landing in a town we wanted to tour). We also traversed lava fields, green pastures, the outskirts of Reykjavik, drove under a fjord in a three-mile tunnel, and were dwarfed by roadside mountains. This is going to be fun (not to mention beautiful).

We got to Borgarnes about 10:00 in the morning, so our room wasn’t going to be ready. We ate a light meal in a bakery that overlooked the mountains and a fjord, and so that was a good use of time. Meredith always leans on Rick Steves for her touring wisdom, and Rick does cover Iceland. So we followed Rick’s introductory walk around town, seeing a small park, the heated town pool, the surprisingly excellent track and field area, a hill commemorating parts of an Icelandic saga (a son’s nurse was hit by a rock and drowned by a cranky father, which made his son retaliate by killing a servant of the dad – strange tales), and a small island, and finished by walking a path along the fjord back to the athletics fields. That got us to noon, and our room was ready, which allowed us to take a long nap until 4:00.

After showering and eating at a local restaurant (where I saw horse on the menu for the first time; I got beef), we jumped in the car and headed off through incredible countryside for about thirty minutes, until we got to Grabrok Crater, a very small extinct volcano. The area is still very rugged since the volcano erupted only about three thousand years ago, but the locals installed a boardwalk with steps all the way to the top. The views of the surrounding countryside kept changing as we climbed, and the views from the top were photogenic. Meredith is very patient with my “Wait! Stop!” moments of reaching for the camera. There is a path all around the lip of the crater, and we took our time strolling along it. The evening was pleasant, and the weather was very good.

Grabrok Crater was the only touristic goal of the day. We took the car back to Borgarnes and settled in for a fairly early evening. We indeed have many things to be thankful for.

We started this morning by driving back to Hershey from where we stayed in Harrisburg. We wanted to visit the Hershey Botanical Gardens. We drove back to Chocolate World, figuring we would see signs to the gardens, but we somehow missed them. We asked the teenage male worker at the gate where the botanical gardens were, and he looked confused. “Motanic gardens?” he asked. “I’ve never heard of those.

After we briefly checked out Chocolate World to see if it was still crazy at 9:45 am (it was), we plugged the word “garden” into the GPS. It was six tenths of a mile away, next to the luxury Hershey hotel. Away we went.

Meredith and I are members of Akron’s Stan Hywet Hall and Gardens, and as such, we get in free to many gardens around the country. Hershey’s is one of those, so we were allowed in. We started with the butterfly house, which has something like four hundred butterflies in it. I love butterfly houses – they are magical. We got to see butterflies eating up close, using their really long proboscis, which they store by rolling up into a small coil in front of their faces. There were all-black ones and violet ones and orange ones, as well as others. They had one called a Luna moth that was imprisoned in a mesh cage because it seems it lays its eggs all over. Oddly, in its moth stage, it has no mouth or way to eat, so I guess it must eat a ton as a caterpillar.

We roamed out to the garden proper. It started as a rose garden, and the roses are still spectacular. They have added a Japanese garden, a rock garden, and an arboretum, as well as other flower gardens. The entire space is about twenty-three acres, so it is a manageable size. We were able to tour the entire park in about two hours. We still had time, so we went and ogled the Hershey Hotel. It is lovely, with multiple balconies and an interior enclosed fake courtyard. My guess is the rooms cost more than the $125 we spent on our hotel in Harrisburg.

We got on the road around 1:00 after trying to find somewhere to eat that didn’t have a thirty-minute wait. We figured we could eat on the road at a less busy time (2:30, as it turned out). We got to Newark with no issues and little traffic, and had a few confusing moments along the way involving parking, and then checking bags/getting boarding passes (why they have international passengers use a kiosk is beyond me – the kiosk always asks us to get an agent). In the end, though, we got to out gate about three and a half hours before takeoff, which was pretty good for an airport we have never used.

Lord willing and everything goes smoothly, the next stop will be Iceland!

After our last summer’s planned trip to Sweden was cancelled due to the Covid pandemic, we kept an eye on which, if any, European countries would open up first. That turned out to be Iceland, so that became our summer of 2021 trip. We booked the trip in July with the hope that more people would get vaccinated, and that would help open things up more, which actually happened – we don’t need to quarantine in Iceland at all now, which is a great thing.

But, out usual plan of flying out of Toronto wouldn’t work this time since the Canadian border has remained closed. So, we found cheap tickets out of Newark, which is seven hours away from Cuyahoga Falls. Since we have never flown out of Newark before, Meredith thought it wise that we should get part of the way there a day before, and so we settled on getting to the Harrisburg/Hershey Pennsylvania area today (Friday). We’ll fly out tomorrow, but we are only two-and-a-half hours away from the airport. We’ll still leave two hours of traffic time as well.

All of which to say, we got to tour Hershey today, going to Chocolate World. I’ve been on the factory tour of a local chocolate company in Ohio, so I thought this would be the same thing, but a little bigger and slicker. I was quite wrong. The Hershey complex is huge. It is home to a resort, an amusement park, a water park, a large stadium for converts (country singer Luke Bryan played there tonight), and of course there was Chocolate World itself. There have been no factory tours since the early 1970’s. Chocolate World is instead a collection of shows and venues, usually related to ways to get you to open a wallet.

We took the free tour, which shows how chocolate is made. But, being a tourist destination, the demonstration is a full-featured ride. You ride in a little car, and see animatronic cows and candy bars along the way while your virtual guide explains how chocolate is made (about a dozen different steps). Fun fact we learned – Hershey’s is one of the only chocolate makers in the world to use fresh milk (others use powered milk).

Chocolate World was fairly mobbed when we went on the tour, but was packed when we got out; a thunder storm had moved in, so the amusement park shut down for a time, and many people came in to Chocolate World. I expect Hershey loves it when a brief storm moves in – some serious money gets spent.

Since the weather was bad and the car was far away, we got tickets to “Hershey Unwrapped”, a show where we were supposed to be students learning how to make chocolate. It involved a box of samples. It was silly and fun with two different actors playing a new teacher and an established teacher, and we had a good time. When we got out, it had stopped raining, so we decided to go back to the car.

That was about all we could do. The influx of people coming in for the concert meant that the crosswalks were full of people, so the cars trying to get out couldn’t go much of anywhere. After about ten minutes of waiting in a parking lot and only moving one car length, we parked and went back to walk around a little. We couldn’t get in to the amusement park, but we could watch some of the roller coasters through the fence. We also looked at the baked goods and custom confectionaries in another store, and by then the traffic was moving.

We headed to our hotel in Harrisburg after one false start (the GPS found three “Front Streets” and I guessed wrong on the first try). We got to the hotel at 7:30 pm but were told out room was not ready yet because the hotel was full for a firefighter’s parade on Saturday. Not great, but we had to eat anyway, so we went and got a light supper at an Indian restaurant, returning at a little after 8:30. No one was at the desk, and there was a sign saying they would be back in five minutes. So, we took a stroll along the Susquehanna River, getting back to the hotel about 9:00. We caught the front desk person leaving again, but managed to get into our room. Where the toilet tank didn’t fill correctly without reaching into the tank to mess with things each time. But, we had to live with it since there are no other rooms. I would have hoped for better from a national chain where we were paying $125/night (as a discount!).

So, tomorrow we will see if we can get smoothly headed to Iceland. Today was a fun day, and it was nice to break up what could have been a nine hour drive. It also acted as a good scouting visit should we wish to come back to explore the local chocolatier another time.

In a small, friendly community like New Baltimore, unexpected visitors drop by one’s house from time to time … but I was still surprised that someone was at the door at nine o’clock.  Matthew had just gone upstairs to bed, so I was the one who answered the door and found Jennifer, a grade-school neighbor girl, holding a tiny ball of white fur in her cupped hands.  She explained, “I found this kitten in the woods, and I didn’t see any mama cat or any other kittens, so I brought it home, but my mom said we can’t keep it, because of our dogs — it might not be safe.”  I called for Matthew to come back downstairs.  Taking the kitten from Jennifer, he said we’d keep it for a day or two, until we had a chance to get it to a shelter.  Somehow, though, I had a suspicion that the proposed shelter trip would never come to fruition.

The kitten’s eyes were open, but they couldn’t have been for long.  It was a tiny thing that couldn’t yet feed itself or even go to the bathroom without assistance.  During those first few days, Matthew became the “mama-daddy,” feeding it formula with an eye dropper and “expressing” its bladder, a term and technique we learned from Matthew’s brother.  Apparently, mama cats lick their kittens’ lower abdomens to encourage them to urinate, so dampening a washcloth with warm water and rubbing a kitten’s belly with it effects a similar sensation.

To keep the kitten from exploring or hiding or getting hurt from some non-kitten-proof furniture or decor, we put it in a box, leaving the top open.  We did it for the kitten’s own good, but it hated the confinement, and would stand on its hind legs and latch its little claws into the side of the box while making a noise that was a cross between a whine and a high-pitched growl — a noise hard to explain but easy to interpret, as it was clearly indicative of frustration.  The kitten obviously shouldn’t have been separated from its mother at such a young age, but I couldn’t watch over it constantly:  after having only been back in Ohio for a few weeks, I’d just started a new teaching job, so every afternoon, I’d come home with trepidation and hope that the kitten had survived another day.  We decided that if the Grim Reaper had come for it, it had probably just made that whining growl and refused to be taken.

Over the years, the kitten experienced myriad changes, starting with a change of gender.  When cats are tiny, their gender isn’t always obvious to the layperson.  Initially, I’d thought the kitten was female, but others convinced us it was male, until a visit to the vet confirmed that she was female after all.

These shifting gender assumptions led to a change of names.  When we’d believed the kitten was male, my aunt suggested Moses as an appropriate name, since the kitten was (sort of) found in the bulrushes, with parentage unknown.  Upon confirmation that she was female, I went back to my original name pick:  Enigma, because her origins were a mystery — but I figured we’d call her Emma for short.  And we did, for a time; however, her name continued its metamorphosis.  In our New Baltimore house, we had lacy curtains at various windows, and when Emma would jump up onto the windowsill, there was something vaguely bridal in the effect of a white cat behind white lace, so we started calling her “Miss Emma-sham,” in reference to the wedding- dress-wearing Miss Havisham in Dickens’s Great Expectations.  This morphed into “Miss Shemma-shem” and then, ultimately, into “Shem-shem,” “Shemmy,” or “Shems.”  These were the names that stuck, although “Shemony” was an occasional musical variation (“Shemony is ivory,” to the tune of “Ebony and Ivory,” and “Shem-shemony, Shem-shemony, Shem-shem sheroo,” to the tune of “Chim Chim Cher-ee”).

Along with a change of names, Shemmy underwent a change of looks as she got older.  Cats are often at their cutest when they’re kittens, but that wasn’t the case with Shemmy.  At first, because she was so little, and she kept looking rather wet about the face and paws, we called her the drowned-rat cat.  She was mostly white, but had a dark gray splotch on her head that looked like an ill-fitting toupee.  With age, though, she put on enough weight that she no longer looked scrawny, and her toupee lightened considerably, and she became obsessive about grooming, often feeling the need to do so immediately after we’d pet her (“washing off the mama-filth/ daddy-filth,” we’d say).  Nonetheless, for a short-haired cat, she had oddly thick, coarse fur that sometimes defied her grooming attempts, especially when the weather turned colder.  One fall, she even had a spiky ridge of fur clumps running from head to tail, as if she were some kind of feline-stegosaurus hybrid.

As Shemmy grew up, not only her looks but also her personality (or should I say “kitty-ality”?) changed for the better.  Whether from nature or lack of feline nurture, she was a feral little thing.  When she was tiny, Matthew would lie on the floor and let her climb onto his chest, which took some effort on her part.  Then he would let her wrestle with his hand.  Both of these playtime activities were cute, but the latter proved unwise, since the hand-wrestling game turned a bit more painful for Matthew as she got bigger, and her teeth and claws got sharper.  Petting her semi-safely involved distracting her attention with one hand while petting her with the other (“Pet the snaky girl,” we’d say, remembering hearing that snakes can be most safely grabbed right behind the head).  Recalling the commercial of our youth in which an owl is asked how many licks it takes to get to the center of a Tootsie Roll Tootsie Pop, we’d ask how many pets it took to get to the center of the Shemmy-fierce (i.e., before she’d try to attack us).  As in the commercial, the answer generally seemed to be three.  Shemmy’s fierceness extended to other cats as well as to us, particularly if they were female.  After two failed attempts to take in other female cats, we promised each other, and Shems, that we wouldn’t try again as long as she was still with us.  Shemmy even had an aggressive-sounding purr.  The purring of most cats is a soothing, peaceful sound, but her purring was loud and fast, less “tender lullaby” and more “gentlemen, start your engines.”

With age, Shemmy got noticeably mellower.  After about a decade, she was a lot less likely to attack us when we’d pet her, and after a few more years, she was practically sweet.  She never was much of a lap cat, but whenever we were on the couch, she’d almost always come sit between us.  She had a talent for staring at us without moving and without blinking.  A colleague who regularly drove by our house once asked us if the white cat in the window was real.  Despite her seeming more standoffish than snuggly, she loved to have her nose rubbed, and if we leaned our faces down to hers, she’d touch noses in a “kitty kiss.”  She also had trouble resisting the lure of the finger:  if she was out of reach on the couch, one of us could just hold out our index finger, and she seemed to feel compelled to come close enough to sniff it.

Our house, too, changed because of having Shemmy in it.  For one thing, it got furrier:  she shed more than any cat we’ve ever known, and we’re not the most diligent housekeepers.  But to make sure that we didn’t go too long without washing our floors — or without washing patches of them, at least — Shemmy would throw up from time to time, with those times being particularly frequent during her kittenhood and in her golden years.  In itself, this isn’t so unusual:  lots of cats have somewhat temperamental digestive systems.  However, what set Shemmy’s barfing apart was the artistry she put into it.  While throwing up, she’d turn in a wide arc, creating room-spanning splatter patterns.  Kind of a Pollock of puke, she was.

The throwing up never left a permanent mark, but Shemmy did do permanent damage to one of our beds in her younger years.  Sometimes, cats are masterful at disappearing for hours at a time, unfindable to their seeking owners until the cats decide (often around dinnertime) that they’re ready to materialize.  One day, though, when looking for Shems under the bed in the guest room, I noticed a bulge in the fabric lining the bottom of the box-spring part of the mattress.  Reaching under the bed to touch the bulge, I found it solid, warm … and purring.  Shemmy had slowly and steadily been pulling out some of the stuffing to make herself a little nest.

I can’t say I always shared Shemmy’s taste in home decor.  For years, most of our cats have used the litter boxes in the basement, but if we didn’t keep a litter box in the kitchen for Shemmy, she’d poop on the floor.  And when she got arthritic as a senior cat, we wanted to make sure she could still get up on the couch to join us, so we put out a step stool to help her.  The one we had on hand was a cheap white plastic one stained with green paint, and it was only intended to be a temporary measure — yet when I ordered a cute wooden step stool, it was apparently not sufficiently stable, and Shems wouldn’t use it.  I tried again with a sturdier wooden one, but nothing doing:  the ugly plastic one became part of our living room furniture, and I just tried to remember to hide it in a bedroom whenever we had company.

In addition to the changes in our house, and in Shemmy, since she first came into our lives, our lives themselves changed.  She became part of our home in August of 2001, within weeks of our moving back to Ohio.  Matthew had just started working as the IT guy at CVCA, and I’d just started teaching eighth grade English at Jackson Middle School.  Since that time, some of the changes have been positive ones.  For example, I got my master’s degree and a job at CVCA, and we bought a house within walking distance of the school.  But we’ve also experienced a lot of loss in recent years.  It’s startling to think that when Shemmy was a kitten, my parents were still alive, as was Matthew’s father, as were Grammy and Grampy Wooster, Grandpa Johnson, Uncle Frank and Aunt Jean, Uncle Bob and Aunt Zovie … in Shemmy’s kittenhood, I don’t think any of them were even sick, let alone gone.

And now we’ve lost another member of our family.  To be honest, we were pleasantly surprised that Shemmy survived 2020 — most cats don’t make it to nineteen years old.  However, though she was obviously slowing down, and though she was troubled with frequent ear problems, she didn’t have any life-threatening physical ailments, to our knowledge.  So when spring break rolled around and we finally had the chance to travel, at least domestically, we took it.  Unfortunately, it turned out that in saying goodbye to Shemmy before our trip, we were saying goodbye for the last time.  When we got home on the Saturday of Easter weekend, Matthew went inside first.  I was still in the garage when he came back out and told me that Shemmy had died.  To our great relief, she had still been alive — and in the kitchen for food — when our friend Liz had come to take care of the cats the day before.  We’re also grateful that our friend Dubbs, who’d been our cat-sitter earlier in the week, had spent some quality time with her in her final days.

So the Grim Reaper finally came back for our little Shems.  I knew that even she couldn’t hold him off indefinitely … but I’m glad she succeeded for almost twenty years.

Our touring schedule sometimes requires perseverance. Today, in order to be in a lovely place, we pushed through:
– Temperatures in the mid-thirties with twenty-something-mph winds (two days after temperatures were in the seventies)
– Counting on the on-site café to be open for breakfast and being disappointed
– Walking a half-marathon (13.1 miles) worth of distance over the course of the day
I know these “hardships” are not much in a pandemic age, but they sure wore me out today. The wind and cold almost made us give up in the first hour, but we stuck it out, and the temperatures, while never warm, did get up to comfortable by noon.

Anyway, we made our way to Norfolk, which is a navy town of 240,000, to go to the Norfolk Botanical Garden. Yes, we had already been to Richmond’s earlier in the week, but our visit was free (for our being members of Stan Hywet Hall and Gardens), we like walking in botanical gardens, and there are some special features of Norfolk’s gardens. They are surrounded by water on three sides (the water of a lake, not the ocean); at 175 acres, it is the largest botanical garden in Virginia; and it abuts an airport. Really, really abuts it – the garden started out as a WPA project at the same time the airport was built in the 1930s. You can walk to and from the airport easily from the gardens, and there is a viewpoint looking right at the airport, with the airport fence only ten or twenty yards away. One of my favorite spots on the grounds is a bench overlooking a quiet inlet of the lake, over which jets were taking off right overhead (just a few per hour, so not too disturbing, but very cool). Anyway, you can actually drive in, fly in, or boat in to the gardens, which is pretty great. There are actually two interconnected canals for boats to float up to the visitor’s center.

So, yes, another botanical garden, but one with a cold start that almost made us change plans. I’m glad we didn’t. There are twenty-six display gardens and two large “exploration gardens” that are essentially woods with good paths and lots of azaleas planted around. I enjoyed all of the spaces, but several stood out to me:

– The Perennial Garden, where hundreds of daffodils and tulips were planted around a fountain, in a symmetrical way, in a place that was adjacent to one of the canals.

– The Renaissance Court, which is a series of terraced lawns facing a huge fountain, which in turn looks onto another great space, which is…

– The Moses Ezekiel Statuary Vista, where the garden has displayed eleven sculptures of famous artists through the ages, with all the statues being created by Moses Ezekiel, who was born in Virginia during the 1800s.

– The Flowering Arboretum, a huge space full of flowering trees, which are planted such that some of the trees are always in bloom. Today it seemed as if every third tree was in full flower. This was probably my favorite place in the botanical gardens.

We saw all the individual spaces, and then caught the last tram going around the park. It was good to sit for awhile, and the tram gave us a good overview of what we had seen during the day, with the driver providing some light commentary along the way. Satisfied that we had done everything to do at the gardens, we quit a little early – at 4:45. Hey, we aren’t young anymore.

This blog entry is brought to you by Kelly Horwitz, my sister, who recommended most of today’s itinerary!

From our cabin, Charlottesville is about a two-hour drive away, so I was a little hesitant to go all that way. So, I e-mailed my sister, who lived there for three years while getting her law degree. I was pretty sure she was going to volunteer to come and guide us around, her praise of the place was so high. I also came to the conclusion that I have driven almost two hours to go to parts of Amish country back in Ohio, so that settled it – westward we went.

It had rained all night long, but had stopped by the time we got to our destination. But it had gotten cold – 40s with wind, which was a far cry from the sunny and 70s we had been enjoying. So we had a rare day on which my often-commented-on Spider-Man jacket was on display next to Meredith’s “whoa!” fuzzy winter jacket. One lady at lunch said she loved both our jackets. We were pleased with that.

Our first stop of the day was a little country shack called Monticello, the home of Thomas Jefferson. We got to see a ten-minute film on Jefferson that focused largely on the contradictions of a man who fought hard for liberty, but kept slaves. I would have liked more of Jefferson’s own words in the film, but it was okay. We actually got to see it twice, because we waited for Jefferson himself to show up in the form of (wait for it) Williamsburg’s actor. When you don’t go to Williamsburg, Williamsburg comes to you. I thought George Wythe was a more powerful speaker, but Jefferson presented his ideas in a conversational tone that was pleasing. He spoke about the delicate nature of a democracy, and how we needed to be vigilant in preserving our liberties by remembering the words of the Declaration of Independence. He spoke for twenty or twenty-five minutes, and then we were ready to head up to the house.

We walked up to enjoy the unfolding views. Monticello is on a small mountain, and so the scenery changes all the time. The walk also led us past the large, still-used family cemetery where Jefferson is buried, with a grave marked by a ten-foot obelisk.

We approached the house from an angle, and lower down, along the gardens on the north side of the hill. So I decided to explore all around the house and save the front for last. We couldn’t go in the house because those tickets had sold out online, but we were fine wandering the grounds. The keepers of Monticello are trying to recreate the gardens as Jefferson had them, and I’m not sure where they are in the process. There were full beds of plants growing, and it was a very pretty spot, so much so that Jefferson had a small writing space constructed there. He would work in the garden some, and then write in his little office overlooking the valley and mountains.

The estate originally had a line of buildings along “Mulberry Row,” which housed free workers and slaves, and housed small shops where things the estate needed were made, or were sold. Most of those buildings are gone, but some have been reconstructed, and Jefferson’s stable still exists. All of the buildings that had information available talked about the enslaved people who lived and worked there, and a few mentioned the free workers who helped to build the house itself.

We wandered up to the back of the house, which is not unusually impressive compared to the more famous front, but has the advantage of far better views. We made our way into a tunnel that went through the basement and storerooms, learning how the household ran.

We finally came around to the front of the house, which is beautiful. To our surprise, it is not huge. It is large, of course, but with much of the space out of sight in the basements and under the two wings of the house, it looked to be a magnificent large home, and not the palace-sized building I had always supposed it would be.

We stopped by a few places we had missed, including the rest of Mulberry Row, and headed back down the path to the parking area. We had a short drive to our lunch place, the Michie Tavern, which dates from about 1793. Kelly had recommended it. In her words – “On the way to TJ’s is Michie Tavern which dates to the 1700s. (Although I think they moved the tavern to its current location from elsewhere, so I don’t think TJ and Monroe were pounding brews there.)” Even if Jefferson never tipped back a brewski there, we got to have our first buffet in a year – really excellent southern food. The concession for the pandemic was we had to wear our masks and put on plastic gloves before we could get to the serving area. We may have had two plates, and the ambiance was great – bare wood everywhere, and tin plates and cups. I loved it.

Stop three on the Tour de Charlottesville was Highland, the estate of James Monroe. The setting of Highland was also quite pretty, but may have been better in that it was lower than the surrounding hills on a couple of sides, so the hills were close up, instead of across a valley. The down side is that the actual house Monroe built and lived in for a time burned to the ground (probably between 1730 and 1750, after he had sold the plantation), and then was completely lost to memory. It was found again in 2014 after some small archeological work was done on site, and they hope to do more this summer.

It turns out what had always been presented as Monroe’s house was actually a guest house (from 1818) and a later addition from 1870. Ooops. They confirmed the dates by dating the tree rings in the timbers used in the existing house. A few outbuildings still survive as well.

Kelly had mentioned she liked the peacocks wandering about, but sadly, they are no more. There are sheep and a donkey and a kitty on the property, but we didn’t get a chance to see the kitty. We did have a long talk with a docent, and she filled us in on all the complexities of working out what had happened to the estate, and how that knowledge keeps changing. We also talked some about Monroe’s slaves, and how he sold many of them off to take care of his debts, but that he refused to break up family groups, even if it meant less money for him.

The final destination of the day was the University of Virginia, but I took a whimsical detour up to Carter Mountain Orchard. The views from on top of the mountain were breathtaking, but some of that may have been the thirty-mph winds whipping around up there. I hope to go back some day when we can sit and enjoy it.

UVA was where Meredith’s dad got his ABD (all but dissertation) degree in English, and my sister got her law degree. Also, it was where Edgar Allan Poe went to school for one semester before having to withdraw because of lack of money. That doesn’t stop UVA from having a marker on Poe’s room and having it viewable from outside, as well as having a medallion in the street leading up to his dorm. We were actually glad they honored him that way, and Meredith was able to get pictures of the Poe-related things.

We stopped by The Lawn, which is the heart of the original campus that Jefferson designed during his retirement. It is harmonious and symmetrical, and I found it to be very pleasing. Not bad for a self-trained amateur architect.

People make much of history, so it is no surprise that I have found interacting with people in Williamsburg to be the most satisfying part of the day. Whether it be tradesmen, guides, historical interpreters, archeologists, or impersonators playing famous people, I have found the people of Colonial Williamsburg to be friendly, interesting, and engaging.

We got to the museum today just as they opened, and we went right to the governor’s palace to get a chance to see inside. Even though we got there right at 9:00, there were already over ten people in line, so we had a fifteen-minute wait or so, which was fine since we had an in-costume interpreter there giving us some background on not only the palace, but some of the neighboring houses as well. For instance, the next house down the street was owned by a man with many slaves; after the war was over, he could not justify fighting for liberty while still owning other human beings, so he freed all of his slaves. This didn’t go over well with the rest of the community, and he finally moved to Maryland.

Once we got into the palace, we got to go through the three main ground floor rooms, as well as look into the side rooms. Sadly, because of Covid restrictions, we were not allowed to go upstairs. The entrance hall and the next room were covered in muskets and swords so as to leave no doubt about who was in charge. Until he wasn’t. In January of 1775, the governor was a hero, having fought off Native Americans in the Ohio valley. But by June of 1775, public opinion had turned so much against him that he sneaked out of the palace back door at 2:00 am, never to return.

I was happy to see the inside of the palace, which was elegant, but I was equally happy that I had not waited an hour for the ten-minute tour. I applaud Colonial Williamsburg for their being open during a pandemic, and taking precautions seriously, but it does cause a long (and well-spaced) line at the most popular attractions.

We did much the same with the nearby Wythe House. Wythe was a prominent lawyer and leader of the community who tutored a young Thomas Jefferson in the law. His home is open, but only the downstairs rooms, so our twenty-minute wait led to an eight-minute tour. But it dumped us into the garden, where in one building were three coopers working. We chatted with them for five or six minutes, which was an unexpected encounter.

Since the Wythe House was our last house we could tour, we went back to the palace gardens to kill some time. The gardens are in full bloom with tulips, which only last a few weeks, so our timing was good. We sat on a bench on top of the old ice house mound, which overlooks the shrubbery maze, and we amused ourselves watching people wandering back and forth.

Next was a rare (in these times) treat – we got to see some theater. There is a small stage near the palace, and we got to see a twenty-minute condensed version of Bach’s “Coffee Cantata,” in which a young woman who is addicted to coffee rejects three suitors who try to convert her to (in order) beer, tea, and water. It was light-hearted and fun, and was only the second play we have seen of any kind in over a year (the other being CVCA’s fall play).

The short length of the play gave us time to walk to the other stage in town, over by the capitol building. We got to see an impersonator be George Wythe himself, and the actor was amazing. His voice was rich, his pacing was deliberate, his command of the material was impressive, and his ability to stay in character for the questions at the end was mesmerizing. He spoke for about thirty minutes, and I felt I could have happily listened to him for an hour. He spoke on the four points of law (municipal, national, scriptural, and natural law, in that order), and tied that in to the need to teach and model virtue for the sake of the republic. He interacted with the audience frequently, always in character. It was a masterly performance, and I was thrilled to get to see it.

After a brief stop in the Williamsburg garden (to talk to the gardeners), lunch was next, which for the third day in a row was at the Williamsburg art museums (they combine a folk art museum with a design museum). That put us next to the last sight we needed to see – an active archeological excavation of the grounds of a wealthy man who was reported as having the best gardens in all of Virginia. We spoke with three of the archeologists on site, and while they are interested in anything they might find, the long-term goal is to discover the old garden beds and what was planted in them, so as to be able to recreate the garden. We got to hear how they looked for discolored dirt in the digs, which indicated that area had been dug up at some point, and they followed those trails. They are in year three of a five-year dig, so they have plenty of additional ground to cover. That is good, since one of the scientists was on day four of digging along a soil trail about three feet long, and had found nothing as yet.

We also chatted on our way out with a friendly young man who was in costume. We talked about the dig, about eighteenth-century sanitation, about the owner of the land and his publicly cantankerous marriage, and about the Facebook group on eighteenth-century clothing. As one does. We like nerds. They are always interesting.

By then, it was about 2:30, and the long-anticipated rain finally started falling, so we made our way into the museum. I overheard there was a musician playing, so we found him and listened to him play the viola da gamba for about twenty minutes, and we got to ask him questions. The viola da gamba is a cousin to the cello, except it has seven strings (instead of four) and is supported by the musician’s legs (instead of a post on the bottom of the cello). So we got to experience theater and live music on the same day.

The museums looked quite fine, especially for a regional museum, but as I was tired, we kind of hurried through them. I did like the exhibit on grandfather clocks, which included the gear mechanisms. We also both liked an exhibit on American portrait painters, which helped even our untrained eyes see the difference between good painters and great painters. Mer also pointed out a sign saying that hooked rugs are arguably the only original American folk art, and they came from Maine. I remember seeing hooked rugs around in my youth in Maine, although I feel braided rugs were more common.

Day three of Williamsburg was a fine day, with lots of interaction with people. If it were a normal year with all the buildings fully open, I expect we would need to be going back for a fourth day, but maybe we can save that for later in this year. For now, for us, Colonial Williamsburg is history.

Meredith and I often laugh about “History Happened Here” signs, since they often seem to talk about something minor happening in the area back in 1910. It usually doesn’t conjure images of long history. Colonial Williamsburg is a different matter – many of the buildings date back to the mid-1700s, and the actors wandering the streets portray Washington, Lafayette, Patrick Henry, and other famous folks, as well as more humble tradespeople.

Sunday night, I was agonizing over if we should spend one day or two touring the historical town. I looked online, and everyone seemed to say two days, so I planned on that. Of course, I got it wrong; we need three. And that is in the many-buildings-closed Covid era. Meredith and I are a bit…thorough.

Williamsburg is mainly along two streets. We didn’t plan it this way, but it worked out so that we did the longer street on Monday, and the shorter street (almost) today. I have to say almost, because there are still two buildings we didn’t get into because the lines were long. We’ll beeline to those tomorrow before the crowds hit, and cross those off the list.

Happily, we went into the ticket office in the not-yet-seen art museum, and my plan was to buy a three-day pass (there are no two-day passes). The cashier asked if we were teachers, and since we are, we ended up with two year-long passes for just twelve dollars (total) more than two three-day passes. So, if we need to spill into a fourth day, we are covered. And we can still come back in the summer or next fall or have Christmas in Williamsburg. Options abound.

We chatted with several actors/docents who were in period costume. Good effort is made to make things appear as authentic as we know how. Costumes are made by hand, using textiles and techniques used in the eighteenth century. All the carts and harnesses are made by the craftsmen in the town, and when they have the opportunity to reconstruct or repair a building, the on-site carpenters and brick makers are involved in that. Some things are updated, since people live in the area – most of the updates aren’t overly visible (outside of cash registers), but the buildings have electricity and plumbing, and the main road is paved. Since the original road was reported to have been covered in mud as deep as six feet at times, I’m okay with the updates that help us enjoy the museum.

There are eighty-eight original buildings in the town (ones dating back to 1776 or so), and many others that have been recreated from original town records and archeological efforts. The long street is about one mile long. There is much to see. Rather than recount everything we saw, I’ll mention a few things that stood out.

The two most impressive buildings are on opposite ends of the town – the capitol building, where all three branches of government met, and the governor’s palace. Both are made of a pretty red brick. The county court (for non-felony cases) was also elegant, and the magazine (armory) was impressively stout in brick. Most buildings were made of wood, and many were small by today’s standards. For the craftsmen, they typically had a shop on the first floor and lived above it on the second floor.

Some fun facts we learned over two days, in no particular order:
– After independence was declared, many raw goods were hard to procure. There are records of skilled workers idle for want of material.
– Orphaned girls could be taken in and apprenticed to silversmiths and blacksmiths.
– 52% of the population of the town were slaves.
– The town had dealings with multiple native tribes, which were treated as independent nations from each other.
– Tribal membership was not strictly based on bloodlines, but captured people could be adopted into the tribe and became full members of the adopting family.
– The waterways around the area are tidal, and so did not work well for water-wheel-run mills. Sawing logs was done with two-man saws, with one man standing in a pit and the other standing on top of the log.
– The town had fourteen taverns (in a town of eighteen hundred people). This was because the government and courts met in town several times per year. When the government moved to Richmond later, twelve of the taverns followed it.
– Enslaved people typically slept in the same room where they worked. Only a couple of the biggest and richest places in town had quarters for the slaves.
– Tailors measured men’s bodies to make clothes, but for dresses, the cloth was pinned up on the women and then sewn.
– County judges (thirteen of them) worked for no pay – it was a status symbol.
– Lafayette paid his own way over here to help in the revolution, and paid for his own upkeep. He was made a major general at the age of nineteen.
– A hogshead barrel of tobacco weighed a thousand pounds, and brought in enough money to buy six and a half more acres. When tobacco prices plummeted, the farmers tried growing indigo instead, which was in fashion.
– The governor of the free state of Virginia (Patrick Henry was the first) had to supply all costs of his entertaining guests out of his own salary.

We had a good time talking with people, and we saw three one-man shows – two by Native Americans and one by “Lafayette” – that were well done, and the closest thing to theater we have seen in awhile.

After the second day in Williamsburg, we made a quick trip out to Freedom Park, home of the small but free Williamsburg Botanical Garden. The park looked huge, but we had run out of touring time for the day. Next time.

We have really enjoyed Colonial Williamsburg, and history really did happen here. Good thing we have another day (and maybe more) to see more of it!

This is a rare domestic trip entry on the blog, but after eight months of our not leaving Ohio at all because of the pandemic, Virginia feels exotic! It’s our spring break, and I decided to take Meredith on a mystery trip. I plugged in “Eight-hour drive from Akron,” and Google gave me a map radius and a few destinations. One of those was Williamsburg. To my knowledge (which turned out to be correct), Meredith had never been, and neither had I. There seemed to be a ton of stuff to do in the area, so Williamsburg it was.

Funny how you forget how to do some things, like packing. Mer wisely uses a list, but even she forgot her toothpaste (I remembered mine, so all was well). Me, not so good. I forgot my pillow and my neck massager (to help with my regular neck issues), and, more seriously, I managed to forget my computer. I actually remembered to bring my printer (to print off tickets and maps and such), but no computer. Genius. I was reduced to using my car-only smart phone on wi-fi, and it drove me into such a rage at using it, I ordered a computer from Amazon. How anyone uses a phone for any non-emergency is beyond me. It definitely firmed up my position on not ever carrying a phone. Sheesh.

Anyway, the trip to Virginia was uneventful, although the eight-hour trip took us nine-and-a-half hours for some reason. We didn’t hit traffic until the last three miles, and we only stopped for a fast-food lunch, so we’re not sure where the time went. We are staying on a small farm that has rooms in the main house, as well as two very nice cabins on the property, and I booked us into a cabin as splurge, since we had not been traveling much in the last fifteen months. The cabin has a porch and rocking chairs, so evenings have been spent eating chocolates and watching cows.

Sunday was supposed to have rain in the morning and afternoon, but had a window from ten to two of no rain. I took the forecast at its word, and drove us, in the rain, to Richmond, to go to the Richmond Botanical Gardens. It stopped raining as we approached Richmond. Go, weather service! As an added bonus, we are members of Stan Hywet Hall and Gardens in Akron, and they have reciprocal admission with about three hundred gardens around the country, so we got into the gardens for free.

The gardens are a great size, especially with rain threatening in the afternoon – about fifty acres, and it took us a little over three hours to walk them all. The conservatory mirrors the welcome center, framing an arbor and a dancing fountain. At the bottom of the hill is a large pond used as a retention basin for another nearby lake, and the shore was awash in colors from daffodils and flowering trees. There is a woods section with more flowering trees, and a Japanese garden with a large tea house next to a waterfall, where we had a pleasant outdoor lunch.

Just as we finished the gardens, it began to rain slightly, so we hurried back to the car and drove off to our next destination, the rain-proof Poe Museum in downtown Richmond. Richmond is the city where Poe spent the most time, and it has the largest collection of Poe memorabilia, which is not overwhelming – it fits into three buildings, built around a courtyard garden. It is an excellent museum, especially if your wife teaches Poe, which mine happens to do. Mer was excited. Plus, the museum has two black cats, like those Poe describes in one story, and they were born on or around Halloween. Poe AND kitties – I scored a big win.

The museum used the artifacts to tell of Poe’s early life, his writing, and the mystery surrounding his death (he died four days after being found in a Baltimore gutter, wearing someone else’s clothes, and he was unable to recover sufficiently to tell anyone what had happened). It brought out in stark relief how many people, especially women, died around Poe – his mother, his first love, his wife, and others. The writing section showed how Poe largely invented the detective story, and wrote science fiction as well as updating the horror genre from Gothic tales to psychological ones.

And, as an added bonus, the rain had stopped when we came out. We used the unexpectedly dry weather to take a walk down by the James River, and up to a monument on a hill (the Confederate statue at the top had been taken down, but the monolith was still there), and then through a residential neighborhood to get back to the car. Nothing spectacular, but a nice walk.

We drove back to Williamsburg, and used the fine evening to wander around the campus of William and Mary, which is much bigger than I had guessed. We spent almost two hours walking around the bulk of the campus. It is very pretty, with all the buildings made of brick, and we found out the college was founded over three hundred years ago, which is saying something in North America.

We went back to our cabin, where we watched the cows join us at home, and went to bed after a happy day of touring.