Butterflies Aren't Free

You know that friend you have who is the one you always end up having adventures with?  I hope you have such a friend - if you don't, you should find one.  Of course for me, that's Mitch - but you've already met.

Wednesday is the Big Day, when I get the keys to my apartment and move in - the day that Mitch and I are driving two carloads of stuff from Jessica's basement up to Chicago.  That will be another adventure, I'm sure, but in the meantime I'm staying at the beautiful home she just bought on Old Mill Road, across from Foster Park which for you non-Fort Wayners is a lovely older neighborhood with stately houses and neighbors who know each other.  I've been helping her unpack a bit, which seems only sporting since she's moved me twice in the past fifteen months. (Saturday was actually the one year anniversary of my moving into the wonderful little green bungalow near Lakeside Park).

One thing you don't know about Mitch is that she is a Containment Officer for a Federally Inspected Facility.  Is that cool or what?  That means that for a few months every year she gets to put up (and enforce) signs like these:

Mitch runs the Botanical Conservatory and they have an annual butterfly exhibit, with butterflies from Africa and Asia and Central America, among other places.  These are what those of us in the industry call "exotic" which means "not from around here."  The problem with living creatures who aren't from around here is that they can carry parasites and diseases which also aren't from around here, and therefore can wreak havoc on the environment around here if they happen to get loose.

(Exhibit A:  the emerald ash borer, which rode in on untreated pallets from China and has been steadily marching outward from the Port of Detroit like Sherman through Georgia, if Sherman had been an evil little bug that killed ash trees.  Of course, in order for us to ship something to China, you have to use treated lumber and get certifications and stamps and all manner of annoyances, but apparently they are allowed to send us whatever the hell they want and we just deal with it.)

Okay, deep breath.  Thanks for giving me a moment.

Anyway, that's why, if you go through a butterfly exhibit, you will (or at least SHOULD) go through multiple doors.  If one of the little butterflies gets free they have to write up a Federal report on the matter.  It's a Big Deal, and given that no one really knows what were to happen if the parasites or diseases got loose, such caution seems appropriate.

And Saturday night I got to help.

A recent shipment of butterfly pupae came in with parasites.  Bugs, to be more specific.  Nasty little things that look like over-sized gnats.

Oh, let's start with a brief refresher - butterflies start, of course, as caterpillars and then become pupae, many of whom look like edamame.  Here are some (pupae, not edamame):

But they're not all green.  Some are brown and some are yellow:

The process is that you place these little fellas on boards until they hatch into butterflies.  Unfortunately, because the previous group was infected, Mitch couldn't put the new batch into the same case and they didn't have a separate case available until late Friday night.  So on Saturday evening, Containment Officer Mitch needed to go in to work to catch the bugs from the old case (which has to be done after dark - pretty cool, huh?) and place the new group of pupae into the new case.

Look at me!

We were working in The Lab, which meant that not only did I go through two doors into the exhibit itself (like the rest of the public - one of whom left a bottle of pop sitting on a bench because he or she was a complete idiot) but then through another special door where only special people like Mitch and me get to go in and don lab coats and booties:

And then into The Lab itself.

Mitch had put me through some training on this - she does take it very seriously, which is good.  She said that there are only two ways that something leaves The Lab.  First, it's a butterfly that is inspected for parasites and then it only gets to go as far as the exhibit tent.  Second, it's doused with bleach and put in a sealed container that will be bleached again and then incinerated.  Being in The Lab at this point and clearly not being a butterfly, that made me a little nervous.  Then Mitch said there is an exception for human beings, which I very much appreciated.  But that's why we wore the lab coats and booties, to reduce the likelihood that something will ride on us out of the Containment Area.  (So you see that the pop bottle left by the idiot will need to be bleached and incinerated, too.)

Our first task was to get the bugs.  For this, you want to use a suction gun and the one they'd ordered wasn't going to be in until Monday.  Mitch didn't think that the butterflies would last that long so one of her staff found a toy gun, designed to let kids get bugs, I guess, and we were going to try that.  You want it dark and then turn on a black light to attract the bugs.

Sadly, the suction on the toy gun was completely inadequate and we only got a couple of the bugs using it.  Luckily, however, the bugs were large enough to be seen and were incredibly slow-moving (we industry professionals would say "their motility was very low" but I don't want to be talking over your head, since you haven't had the benefit of my training and experience).  Therefore Mitch was able to save about a half dozen butterflies which she placed into a mesh container after making sure that they didn't have any bugs on them.  Later in the evening, I got to free the butterflies which, since they don't want to move at night, is harder than you'd think so Mitch had to help.

Mitch said that I could be the Sanitation Coordinator which meant cutting up the shipping box and spraying bleach all over it before putting it in the trash can.  I felt very special having a title.  Before long my performance was so exemplary (which meant that I finished cutting up the box without hurting myself or anyone else) that she promoted me.  One of the pupae was moving around already, trying to get out of its little shell.  They seem to have an easier time of it, Mitch said, if they are hanging upside down so I got to hold him for about twenty minutes until it was time to place him on the board.  I was like a Butterfly Midwife.

Isn't he brave?  Mitch said she wasn't sure whether he'd make it, since he started to hatch while in between two cotton pads in a FedEx box, and that I shouldn't get too attached to him.  Still, I had to cheer for the little guy, and when we left he was still wriggling his way out which was a good sign.

This is what Mitch was doing:

She pins them at the very end where they have spun some silk, so don't worry about whether she's stabbing them or anything.

Oh - here's a pupae that was about ready to start breaking out.  You can see the wings (which are blue and yellow) through the shell (which is clear).

Here are a couple of pictures of what the cases look like:

This first picture is of the butterflies that had the parasites.  The blue tape is to seal (or, as we Containment Professionals would say, contain) the parasites.  Here is a picture of the case that we filled up with my friend and his buddies:

They'll hang there until they break free, then they will, Mitch said, be very drippy as part of the process of their wings hardening, so she had me put paper towels on the shelves.  At that point I started to consider myself a Deputy Containment Officer, although the paperwork on that hasn't gone through yet.

Butterflies only live for a couple of weeks.  Mitch said that this is their rock star period, where they mostly get high and, um, reproduce.  I asked her about the getting high part, since I had seen no evidence of drug paraphernalia in the exhibit.  She said that all they eat is sugar.  Okay, I get it.  So go enjoy, little butterflies.  Livin' the dream.

Speaking of rock stars, we were treated to a variety of DJ Wedding Classics while working.  (It is a Botanical Conservatory and it was a Saturday evening late in the spring).  Of course they played Everybody's New Favorite:  Gangnam Style.  (It's funny that two of the "must plays" at family friendly events are a Korean rap song and the 70's gay anthem, YMCA, but there's no accounting for how culture adapts.)

Then we went out for dinner, although I avoided anything that looked like edamame.

It's always fun to do something completely different, and even better when that something helps save a little life, even if only for a couple of weeks.  It is better still when that something is a perfect metaphor for one's own life, although I'm anticipating mine lasting for more than a couple of weeks.  Plus I can add Sanitation Coordinator to my resume.

How Did I Miss This?

When I moved to Fort Wayne 28 years ago (good grief - has it been that long?), nobody told me we were two hours from the beach.  Not some piddly lake beach, but a real beach that looks like Cape Cod and where you can't see across the water.  Better late than never, I guess.

Having a couple of days in between signing my lease in Chicago and needing to get back to Fort Wayne for various reasons, I thought that I'd check out the Indiana Dunes which is conveniently located between the two.

Behold a dune:

Very, very beautiful.

The Indiana Dunes is both a National Lakeshore (run by the National Park Service) and a State Park.  And on the east end, more or less, is Michigan City, which has a really great park called Washington Park.  I mean, if I were to show you the following picture of a park you would be pretty unimpressed, right?

But what if I were to tell you that if you turned around 180 degrees, you'd see this?

Now I have your attention.  Then walk about 100 yards and you'll get to this:

Yeah, I've got more respect for Michigan City now than I used to, too.

Years ago - before they destroyed it with a cruise ship pier - I'd visited Key West and, along with everyone else, made the nightly pilgrimage to Mallory Pier to watch sunset.  It was always beautiful, but honestly, Key West has nothing over sunset from the State Park beach.  Okay, other than margaritas.

Don't you agree?  And imagine the colors more beautiful and delicate than they show in that picture - the Droid isn't exactly the best camera for use at sunset.  If you look really closely at the waterline on the right side of the picture you'll see Chicago, although I can't pick out the building where I'm going to be living.

The thing about the Indiana Dunes is that they are in what Hoosiers call The Region (pronounced Da Region), which is Northwest Indiana.  There are all sorts of interesting things about The Region but the relevant one here is that its primary industry is, well, industry.  One of the largest steel making facilities in North America borders the National Lakeshore, and a large utility company has a plant right on the lake.  So  you can't really be a purist here, or these sorts of views will drive you nuts.

Of course, not being a purist is a skill that I have honed over 28 years (has it been that long?) of living in Indiana.

The State Park has camping along with a really beautiful beach.  The National Lakeshore has several beaches, a couple of historic homesteads, and (drum roll, please) Mount Baldy.  Having hiked mountains in New Mexico and Virginia, I was interested in the concept of a sand dune mountain.  They're not as big as a real mountain, of course, but they're a challenge to walk up because you're walking in sand.  Plus, they move.

The first picture in this post and the one with the power plant in the background are also Mount Baldy.  Since the mid-1930's, Mount Baldy has moved inland quite a bit, and the National Park Service has gotten worried that if nothing is done in about seven years it will cover its parking lot and then Highway 12.  So about five years ago they started planting grass (which visitors had killed by walking on it) to help stem (pardon the pun) erosion, and they've rerouted the trail.  You can still get to the top, and it's only about a 10 minute hike although it gives your legs a bit of a workout.

Here's an interesting fact:  although it is only the third largest Great Lake, Lake Michigan has had the most shipwrecks.  The State Park has the propeller from the J.D. Marshall, a steam-powered barge that sank three hundred yards offshore on June 11, 1911, during a squall.  Four men died and six survived.  Apparently storms on the Great Lakes are often more dangerous than ocean storms because their relative shallowness allows waves to crest more easily.

A real deficiency of the blog is that it doesn't have enough charts, so let me correct that here and now.  By the way, this can also serve as a handy reference guide for the names of the Great Lakes - including, as it does, Lake St. Clair which is the one that you always forget.

Michigan City is home to the Old Lighthouse Museum which is a really good museum in an old lighthouse near the Coast Guard facility and the marina.  It was home to a lighthouse keeper and an assistant keeper, and there are rooms decorated as they would have been while used as a lighthouse for about 100 years until 1940.  The museum also presents a good history of Michigan City.

At one point, Michigan City and Chicago vied for the role of premier southern Lake Michigan port.  Due to unspecified "politics," the museum notes, the government money for infrastructure all went to Chicago and that was that.  It certainly wasn't the last time that Hoosiers were outpoliticked for Federal funding.  You'd think that somebody would learn, but that is a topic for another time.

Anyway, back in the day people used to like to come by boat or train from Chicago and elsewhere to spend the day in Washington Park which had a variety of attractions along with the beach.  In 1915, the Western Electric Company in Cicero, Illinois, chartered several boats to take employees and their families across the lake for such an excursion.  About 2,500 employees and their families boarded the first of several boats, the S.S. Eastland, at the Chicago River dock.  No one seems to know what happened next but the boat rolled over and more than 800 people lost their lives.  It was the largest loss of life from a single disaster in Great Lakes history.

The museum describes a couple of other tourist attractions in Michigan City at the turn of the 20th Century.  One was the state prison - which is still here, but not so much a tourist destination anymore.  The other was a giant sand dune - 200 feet high, about three times the size of Mount Baldy - called the Hoosier Slide.

The Hoosier Slide was a landmark for people travelling on Lake Michigan - originally the Indians, and the French used it as well.  But the sand was bothersome on a windy day - plus it was handy for the burgeoning glass industry in Michigan City and especially in central Indiana, where the Ball Brothers made so many canning jars that it is not possible today to walk into an antique store anywhere in America and not see one.  So they built rail road lines right up to the dune and shipped out 30 rail cars of sand per day starting in about 1890.  By 1920 (demand had been particularly strong during World War I), the dune was gone.  At lake level, the sand was dark red and contained human bones - it seems to have been an ancient Indian burial ground, which would have been used before the dune had been created, however many hundreds or thousands of years ago that had been.

Michigan City was a stop for President Lincoln's Funeral Train.  The museum displays a map showing the route, which went from Cleveland to Columbus, Ohio, to Indianapolis then to Lafayette and up to Michigan City where it went around the lake to Chicago.  The map is covered with little clippings, including one that notes that the train did not go through Fort Wayne.  The clipping says "Fort Wayne citizens were much more kindly disposed to Lincoln the Martyred President in 1865 than they had been toward Lincoln the Politician on October 2, 1860 [during his first Presidential campaign] when he was hanged in effigy within the city limits."  The clipping does not specify a source, and I will refrain from any editorial comment on the matter.

Oh, if you visit the area, which I strongly recommend that you do, be sure to stop by Wagner's in Porter and have some terrific barbecue.

Isn't it always the case that you miss what's in your own backyard?  The good news is that I'll only be an hour away in Chicago and therefore will have an opportunity to return.  Which I will, both for the dunes and for the barbecue.

Let's See Whether People Care More About Woodrow Wilson Than Robert E. Lee

In an OCD sort of way, I check the statistics for the Driveabout pretty regularly.  Although I send out an e-mail to a list that is now over fifty people every time I update, the statistics tell me that most readers enter the blog from Facebook.  And so, over the past few months, I've learned, for instance, that I can't post the Facebook notice of a blog update too late in the evening or no one will see it.  (In case you're wondering, Blogger statistics don't indicate how many discrete readers there are - or indiscreet ones, for that matter - but based on pageviews it seems there are about 75 people who read the blog pretty regularly.  The most pageviews was for Baseline, which was the first post of my trip, and that has had 248 in total over the past five months.)

So I found it a little curious that nearly no one (42 pageviews as of 24 hours after a weekday morning publication) has read the Robert E. Lee post.  Apparently he is dead to you.  More people have looked at Grizzly Goldner and that was posted twelve hours later, perhaps because you assumed that there'd be a picture of me with a beard, and I agree that a bearded Karen would be more amusing to look at than a bearded Civil War general.

Not to be deterred, this morning we're going to have another Famous Virginian lesson - and this one is about someone I always thought was from New Jersey.

Leaving Charlottesville mid-morning in a light drizzle, I encountered heavy fog for a couple of miles on I-64 at the southern end of the Blue Ridge Mountains.  "Heavy" might be an understatement - this was pea soup.  It alternated being pretty and scary, so I guess I will say that it was pretty scary.  When it broke, the sun shone through, shrugged, looked around blankly, and asked, "what?" as if nothing had happened

To get to Charleston (WV, not SC) you get on I-81 South for a few miles just outside of Staunton, Virginia, and it was at this junction that I saw the sign for the Woodrow Wilson Presidential Library.  While I might zip by President McKinley in order to get to dinner on time, I was in no such hurry yesterday - and President McKinley, well, he was no Woodrow Wilson.

Turns out that Wilson not only was born in Staunton, where his father was a Presbyterian minister, but that he identified as a southerner even after he had lived in New Jersey many years, become President of Princeton, and even elected Governor of that state.  (This might account for Wilson's poor record on civil rights.)

The Woodrow Wilson Presidential Library and Museum is located in three beautiful old homes near downtown Staunton, one of which was the manse (parsonage, for you non-Presbyterians out there) where Wilson was born and lived for about 16 months in the 1850's until his father was called to a church in Georgia.  His mother had family in the area, however, so Wilson visited the town while growing up and particularly when he was in law school at UVA, just a train ride away across the mountains.  He returned to the home of his birth for a couple of nights in December, 1912, to celebrate his 56th birthday as President-Elect.

Finding the museum was not the easiest thing I've done in a couple of days, due to resurfacing the street where the museum is located, but when I walked in I was greeted as if I were a relative thought to have been lost at sea.  (It was not quite the greeting that Wilson received in 1912, but since I wasn't born in Staunton this seemed fair enough.)  Such a welcome would have made sense to me had I been the only patron, but there were quite a few folks, I thought, particularly for mid-week.  Wilson has a fan club, apparently.

They have a film, of course, and a very nice museum, and then you get a guided tour of the manse.

One point that they make, which is a good one, is how much changed from March, 1913 (just over 100 years ago), when Wilson took office, until 1921 when he left.  For example, in 1913 Great Britain was still the dominant world power; by 1921, that role had shifted to the United States.  The U.S. had intervened militarily in Europe, Mexico, the Caribbean and Russia during this time.  The role of the Federal government grew greatly:  anti-trust and business regulation, the income tax, the Federal Reserve system.  A number of important social/political changes occurred as well, with women's suffrage being the most significant, but also other democratic (small D) reforms such as direct election of Senators.  Obviously Wilson had a large role in many of these changes.  (Although his role in women's suffrage was more of a follower than as a leader.)

Wilson was only the second Democrat (capital D) elected to the White House since 1860 - in other words, since the Civil War.  (The other was Grover Cleveland, elected in 1892.  Andrew Johnson was a Democrat but only became President upon Lincoln's assassination and was never elected.)  Wilson was not the unanimous choice - it took a record 46 ballots to nominate him at the Democratic Convention - but in the General Election he was able to take advantage of a split in the Republican party (incumbent President Taft versus Teddy Roosevelt, who ran on the Bull Moose Party) and the presence of a fourth candidate, Socialist Eugene Debs.  He won a large majority of the Electoral College despite winning only 42% of the popular vote.

Although Wilson lead the creation of the Federal Reserve central banking system and child labor laws, among other important items, he is of course best known for his role in World War I and his effort to create the League of Nations following the war.

The main level of the home where the museum is located (which was just being built when the Wilsons lived down the street in the mid-1850's) features the main exhibits and Wilson's cherished Pierce-Arrow car.  (As a Hoosier, it was a little weird to see an exhibit about a car that didn't focus primarily on where it was manufactured!)  There are artifacts such as this magazine cover from the New Jersey gubernatorial campaign where he ran (and served) as a reformer.  I like the caption:  "It takes grit to remove grime."

Interestingly, despite statements like the one above, Wilson was not generally viewed as a reformer before he was elected - not by the politicians and bosses who backed him, and not by the Progressive movement.  He surprised everyone after he was elected by supporting Progressive causes such as public utility regulation, workers compensation, and election reform.

All of these exhibits are well done, but the basement of the museum contains the highlight and it is absolutely creepy.  When I first went downstairs I was the only person in the exhibit and it felt like I was walking into a haunted house.  The exhibit focuses on World War I, in particular what it was like at the front line.

You can look through the periscope they used (which is just past the soldier-mannequin in this picture) and when you enter the basement the sound system turns on so you really feel like you're in a trench.  It's not a place you want to stay long.

Because fifty years and much technological innovation separated the wars, it's easy to forget that World War I was a trench war, in a lot of ways similar to the Civil War.  Wilson, who was a boy during the Civil War (and whose father served as a chaplain for the Confederate army), did not forget this.  Wilson is quoted on a sign on the wall to the basement that says,

I come from the South and I know what war is.  I have seen its wreckage and ruin.  It is easy for me as President to declare war. I do not have to fight....It is some poor farmer's boy, or the son of some poor widow who will have to do the fighting and dying.

Following World War I, Wilson fought to establish the League of Nations to provide a peaceful mechanism for nations to resolve conflicts.  The U.S. Senate refused to ratify our participation in the League.  The English and French wanted to punish the Germans and they did so, with the result of course being the rise of Nazism and World War II.

Wilson's first wife died while he was President, and he was remarried to Edith while in the White House.  You may recall that Wilson had a series of strokes toward the end of his presidency and there is some controversy about whether Mrs. Wilson effectively became President during this time, or whether she just served as a go-between, communicating President Wilson's thoughts and orders.  In 2006 the museum received a donation of the private letters of Wilson's physician from the physician's family, and based on those letters it seems clear that Mrs. Wilson was making decisions because her husband was, indeed, a very sick man.  (After leaving office, Wilson lived in Washington, DC for three years before he died.  Mrs. Wilson lived for another 35 years and helped open the museum in Staunton, along with President Franklin Roosevelt.)

Then the tour begins.  A really nice lady named Linda invited us to return to April 18, 1856, as we walked from the museum to the manse.  She explained the setting at the time - across the street from the home were only woods, and the three-story manse is built to be most impressive from its back, which faces down a hill to the First Presbyterian Church where Rev. Wilson served.  There is a Presbyterian women's college across the street but in 1856 it consisted of only one building, further down the street from the manse.

We entered the manse from the lower level, which Linda called the "working level."  Here was the kitchen, a laundry room, an informal eating area where the family took their daily meals, and the cook's bedroom.  The Wilsons were from Ohio and in letters Mrs. Wilson referred to having three "servants" provided by the church to help her.  But this was pre-Civil War Virginia, Linda reminded us, and these "servants" were likely slaves owned by a local farmer and rented to the Presbyterian Church.

The kitchen of the manse was very modern for the 1850's, featuring an iron stove.  Linda explained that the origin of the word "range" is that the stove features a range of temperatures.  The front burners were directly over the fire, while the back burners were heated only indirectly - hence the term, "putting it on the back burner."  Another old phrase which dates to this time, Linda said, was having "irons in the fire" - a reference to the need to keep several irons heating up so that they could be used to iron clothing before cooling.

Thomas Woodrow Wilson was born in the manse December 28, 1856.  He had two older sisters and would eventually get a little brother although not for eleven years.  He was named for his maternal grandfather and uncle, both named Thomas Woodrow.  As a child he was called Tommy but dropped the Thomas altogether as a young man.  Linda said that Mrs. Wilson got to name him, while Rev. Wilson named their second son, who became Joseph Wilson, Jr.  You rarely hear about a second son being named Junior, but that's what happened with the Wilsons.  And President Woodrow Wilson sounds better than President Joe Wilson, for sure.

The main floor of the manse includes the bedroom (and bed) where Wilson was born, Rev. Wilson's study, and a parlor and dining room.  After the Wilsons left in 1858, many ministers and their families lived here including the one who opened his home to President-Elect Wilson in 1912, which must have been pretty exciting.

Also nearby in western Virginia is Lexington, home of Stonewall Jackson's final resting place, but I passed it by to make sure I got through the mountains to Charleston before dark.  Which I did.  Thank goodness for Daylight Savings Time.  Another reason I like Daylight Savings Time is that when I am talking with a Hoosier Republican with whom I don't want to argue politics, such as Sandy's fiance Bill, I can say that I do agree with former Governor Daniels about DST.  It's nice to have at least a little common ground.

Grizzly Goldner

After several weeks of visiting friends and family and learning about history, I needed to get outside.  And so on a sunny afternoon it was off to the Shenandoah National Park in the Blue Ridge Mountains!

The park is long and thin, connected from Front Royal, Virginia, in the north to Rockfish Gap (near Waynesboro, Virginia) in the south by the winding and scenic 105-mile long Skyline Drive.  I entered from the south, where it was 80 degrees at 1900 feet around 2 p.m.  A half hour later, I had driven north about twelve miles but had risen in elevation a thousand feet and it was 71 degrees.  It's a classic drive:  you go from scenic overlook to scenic overlook, although a number of them were closed for repairs.  No worries - everything was beautiful.

It's still spring so the trees weren't all yet green in the valleys, and most of the deciduous (I love that word) trees in the mountains were still bare.  But you can't get that high without being awed!  Here are a couple of shots:

This second one is of Bacon Hollow, which I must warn you has no bacon.  I know, truth-in-advertising and all - I think I'm going to write to the President.

My goal was not simply to drive through the park but also to go on a short hike, and I found one at the Frazier Discovery Trail.  It is a 1.3 mile loop 450 feet up to the top of Loft Mountain that is advertised as "moderate hike to beautiful views" which was exactly what I was looking for.  And I think "moderate hike" is probably the right phrase:  it's pretty steep in parts, and there are some rocks you have to cross which are slightly treacherous, but you never have to really do any climbing (i.e., with your hands) - you're walking the whole way.

And here's the best part:  you are on the Appalachian Trail for a couple of hundred yards.  Yup, you are reading the blog of an Appalachian Trail hiker.  That's me.  You can tell it's the Appalachian Trail because the blazes (that's what we Appalachian Trail hikers call the little spots of paint on trees which mark the trail) are white, whereas on the rest of the Frazier Trail they are blue.  They also have some guideposts to keep less, um, experienced hikers from getting lost.

But I didn't expect you simply to take my word for it, so here is photographic evidence:

I had come to the mountains somewhat prepared for a hike.  By "somewhat," I mean that I was wearing jeans and hiking shoes, and had a jacket in the car should I have needed it which when I set out for a 45 minute hike I didn't think I would.  (Turns out I was right about that.)  But that was it.  I hadn't even remembered to bring the compass that my friend Kelly gave me for Christmas, which might have been at least fun to use, if unnecessary due to the blazes marking the trail.  I didn't have any water either, which turns out to have been fine since it was about 70 degrees and the hike was not a long one.  I had my cell phone, although I hadn't thought to use it to tell anyone where I was.

But as I set out on the little trail, it occurred to me that perhaps the part of the hike I was least prepared for was what to do in case of meeting a bear.

A couple of weeks ago my friend Cathie lent me an excellent book called A Walk in the Woods by Bill Bryson, about hiking the Appalachian Trail.  If you haven't read it, I'd highly recommend doing so.  He talks a lot about bears in the book, and those pages were still fresh in my mind.  Bryson points out that there are very few bear attacks and then says, in one of my favorite lines in the book, "...but, and here's the thing, it only has to happen once."  Exactly.

Therefore I tried to develop a bear plan as I walked along, hoping that I wouldn't come across any grouchy "just waking up" bears or worse, any baby bears with their mamas nearby.  In previous lives I have told many people that "hope" is not the same as "plan," and of course I am correct about that, but I will admit that I did more hoping than planning during my little hike.
 
Bryson says that black bears, the kind I would be most likely to encounter in the Appalachians, can climb trees so there's no point trying to do that.  Anyway, it's been so long since I've climbed a tree that I probably couldn't even out climb a grizzly.  Experts have different opinions as to whether you should either make noise or not make noise, run away or stand still, so I was left without enough information to matter.  I never did come up with a bear plan, although I assume that I would have done the "run and make noise" option had it come to that.  And perhaps I'd have thrown my cell phone at them.

Fortunately, to paraphrase the old saying, God looks after fools and Goldners, so I didn't have to test the "noise scares them off" hypothesis and I got to keep my cellphone.  Plus as I was walking down from the trail there were two women walking up it, so I wouldn't have laid there too long before help arrived.

The other thing you need to worry about in the mountains is rapidly changing weather.  When I started off on the little hike I was going more or less straight uphill, and that combined with the sun kept me plenty warm.  The Appalachian Trail part of the hike was flat so I stopped huffing and puffing, and the views were spectacular.

 
It was starting to cloud up a bit when I was at the summit, so I didn't dawdle and worked my way around the trail.  This rock formation was cool, but made me worry more about bears.  I kept going.

By the time I reached the trailhead, it felt quite a bit cooler although certainly was still comfortable in a short sleeved shirt.  I felt badly for the women who were just starting out though, because as I got in the Vue and headed back up Skyline Drive, it started to rain, although it didn't last very long.

Speaking of the Vue, the Driveabout hit 17,000 miles at the Upper Hawksbill Parking Lot, elevation 3630 feet.

The highest point on Skyline Drive is at a resort called Skyland, where you can rent cabins, eat in the dining hall, shop in the gift shop or, as I did, go to the bathroom.  The elevation is 3680 feet, which is 2200 feet lower than Silver City but still pretty respectable.

The Shenandoah National Park was built in the mid-1930's, at which time they relocated several hundred families from the property - I don't know to where.  This was before the Uniform Federal Relocation Act so it wouldn't surprise me if they were just told to leave, perhaps being paid reasonably for their homes and perhaps not.  It would be interesting to know more about that story, but this afternoon was about the outdoors, not history.  Sometimes you just need some fresh air and a good walk in the woods.

Robert E. Lee Slept Here...and Here...and Over There...

Virginia is home to a lot of American history.  I'd say about 40% of anything significant that happened prior to the 20th Century happened here.  That number is completely pulled out of the air, of course, but you get my point.  In fact, you'd think that the Virginia tourism people might start using that concept in their marketing, since "you can't get there from here" probably isn't a winner.  But I digress, which is sort of impressive since I haven't even started yet.

To get back to the subject at hand:  Tuesday was History Immersion Day, beginning in Yorktown and ending outside of Appomattox Court House.  I covered over 250 years of history and never left the state.  Or, rather, the commonwealth.  And then just to prove that wasn't a fluke, I spent the next morning at Monticello, just outside of Charlottesville.

Up until the Driveabout, I didn't know a lot about American military history - by that I mean the strategies and events that impacted various battles even when I knew the names of those battles.  Case in point:  The Siege of Yorktown.  This is the battle that, in 1781, led to British General Cornwallis surrendering his army to George Washington and effectively ending the American Revolution.  (I say "effectively" because the Treaty of Paris wasn't signed for another two years.)

Not being a military historian, I'm not sure I should overstate this, but it seems to me that the Americans beat the British at Yorktown because of the French and bad weather.  The French navy turned back the British fleet, preventing them from bringing reinforcements and supplies to Cornwallis who was penned in at Yorktown.  French soldiers, committed to Washington's command, played a significant role in capturing land controlled by the British.  And the weather?  Cornwallis had as his back-up plan to retreat across the York River, which is very wide at that point.  But a sudden storm came up and prevented the British from escaping.  Given his desire to avoid further heavy casualties and with nowhere to go, Cornwallis surrendered.

Not that I want to sound like I'm minimizing the role of Washington and the Americans here, but they were basically on par with the British (which in itself is quite a thing to say, as the British were the world's premier colonial power and the Americans had started the war as a bunch of untrained farmers and shopkeepers).  The war had become a series of bloody draws.  It was the addition of the French, and the luck of bad weather, that finally pushed the British over the edge.

Ten days after the victory at Yorktown, the Continental Congress authorized the building of a Victory Monument.  Of course, they didn't authorize any actual money to build the monument, and didn't get around to doing so until about 100 years later, in 1880.  In 1956, lightning damaged the statue at the top of the monument so they rebuilt the statue, replacing Lady Liberty with a different pose.  Here is the statue today:

Yorktown is part of the Colonial National Historic Park which means your $10 admission gets you into the National Park Service facilities at Williamsburg and Jamestown in addition to Yorktown.  They're all within about a 30 minute drive of each other, and the drive itself, along Colonial Parkway, is very pretty.

Since I wanted to get to Appomattox Court House before it closed later in the afternoon, I skipped Williamsburg and headed to Jamestown, where British colonists settled in 1607.

One of the first industrial efforts of the colonists was to make glass.  Being something of a glass artist myself, I stopped in at the glass shop which the Park Service operates using more or less the same technology as the Jamestown settlers used in 1608.  Although they were able to produce glass to send back to England - the first factory-built product in America - a variety of factors caused the effort to fail.  Still, it's interesting to watch the glass blowers, and I bought a couple of glasses for my new home in Chicago.

Then onto Jamestown, which is a little more confusing than it sounds.  You see, there are two Jamestowns.  One is a privately run living history museum and the other is the Park Service's operation which is located on grounds of the original settlement and showcases the archaeological excavation there.  The signage is sometimes clear and sometimes not, but eventually I found the excavation, complete with an archaeologist.

She explained what she was doing.  The building behind her is the church (which was rebuilt in 1907 as part of the tricentennial celebration) and the graves next to her are, well, graves.  She said that the settlers buried people in the British fashion which is to say on top of each other.  That made sense in England, being a relatively small island and all, and the colonists apparently hadn't figured out that they had an entire continent in which to bury people.  Anyway, the purpose of her excavation is to find the outline of the original fort.  If you look at her feet you will see a line in the dirt, and that is the foundation of the fort's wall.

Before long her boss came over and shooed us all out so that she could get back to work.  Then I started talking with Howard, a very knowledgeable volunteer.  He showed me the excavation of this storeroom, complete with an oven in the back corner:

Next to the rebuilt church is a tower which Howard said has been here since the mid-17th century.  They plan to restore it, making bricks and tuckpointing the way it would have originally been done.

But even here, in a colonial settlement, you see evidence of later history because this is Virginia.  The berm in this picture was built as part of a Confederate fort that was used to defend against Union penetration along the James River.

The bugs are terrible at Jamestown, by the way, and the water is brackish (a combination of fresh water and sea water).  The settlers put up with these conditions and lived at Jamestown for nearly 100 years despite the ample supply of fresh water further inland.  Neither Howard nor I could figure out why.  Nowadays they have a nice little cafe so I had lunch (inside, to avoid the bugs) and drove west.

The road (or, really, roads) from Jamestown to Farmville, my next stop, inadvertently led me along the path of the Confederate retreat in 1865.  I guess that wasn't entirely surprising, as the reason I was going to Farmville was to see a bridge which had been part of that retreat, but I hadn't set out that morning with the intention of driving along with General Lee.  The route is well marked - certainly the people in charge of signs in Northern Virginia could take a lesson from the Civil War tourism people - and you follow both state highways and, occasionally, local roads.

I sort of picked this up at Petersburg which coincidentally was along my path and where, fortunately, I followed a sign to see General Grant's headquarters at City Point where two older couples and I got a great tour from a young park ranger named Emmanuel.

In 1864, things were going badly for the North.  In the summer, it wasn't entirely clear that Lincoln would be  re-elected or even renominated, although, in the end, both occurred.  Emmanuel explained that Lincoln needed a winning general and so far hadn't found the right man.  He brought Ulysses S. Grant back from his posting in the west and made him commander of all Union troops.  Grant was a field general and didn't want his headquarters in Washington, so he set up his operation on a temporarily abandoned plantation owned by Dr. Richard Eppes.  The property sticks out into the James where it meets the Appomattox River - which, like the York River further east, is very wide and feels a bit more like a lake.  From this vantage point, you can see what's coming for quite a ways and it would be pretty easy to defend.  In addition to (and strategically more important than) Grant's headquarters, City Point was the Union's major supply depot.  The key to winning a siege, of course, is making sure you have plenty of stuff and, when necessary, the ability to bring in fresh troops.  This makes it a lot easier to win from the outside than from the inside.  (Unless, of course, you're the Germans and decide to lay siege to a Russian city over the winter.  Kind of an odd  coincidence that the city in Russia was St. Petersburg, known as Leningrad at the time.  Remind me never to live anywhere named Petersburg.)

Grant had his men expand railroad lines to the front at Petersburg, so that supplies could be shipped in by water to City Point and then by rail to the army.  There's a park on the way from Petersburg to City Point that was a Union fortification and still has the earthen berm to prove it.  A sign at the park says that nearby the Federal railroad construction brigade was instructed to build "an immense building for a bakery" in August of 1864 which then shipped that bread by rail a few miles south to the Union troops.

The end of the Siege at Petersburg was not the end of the Civil War, but the city's fall sent the Confederates into retreat.  Lee's plan was to lead his starving men to a town called Amelia Court House where provisions were supposed to be waiting, then further west where they would either defeat the Union troops or, failing that, disappear into the mountains of North Carolina to begin a guerrilla campaign.  At this point the Confederates were ahead of the Federal troops.  But the provisions at Amelia Court House had been stolen, and Lee's starving men spent a day foraging, which cost the army valuable time.

For some reason I had become fascinated, perhaps even slightly obsessed, with the idea of seeing High Bridge, which is a bridge that the Confederates attempted to destroy after they crossed it to prevent the Federal troops from following them.  The bridge was largely stone and their efforts were unsuccessful.  That  allowed Grant to pursue Lee from the east as well as from south.  More terrible fighting ensued and the rest, as they say, is history.

The bridge is still there - all 2,400 feet of it, over 100 feet above the Appomattox River - but it's really only accessible from a bike path, and my bike is in Fort Wayne being tuned up.  At that point in the afternoon I was more focused on getting to Appomattox Court House before it closed than I was at continuing my snipe hunt, so I abandoned my dream of seeing High Bridge and drove northwest.

Following both Google Maps and  Lee's Retreat tourism signs, I arrived at Appomattox Court House 33 minutes before it closed for the evening.

Perhaps you already know this but I didn't:  Appomattox Court House is the name of a town, not a building.  Of course, the reason for the town's name is because it is where the Court House for Appomattox County is located (and in which currently resides the National Park Service Visitor Center), but the structure where the terms of surrender were signed is actually a private residence, owned by one Wilmer McLean.  For a civilian, this poor guy just kept running into the war.  A businessman, he and his family had lived in Manassas where his home had been taken over by General Beauregard during that battle.  To get away from the war, he moved to what seemed like a relatively safe place, Appomattox Court House.  Then one day in April of 1865 there's a knock on the door with another Confederate officer explaining that they'd need to use his house for a day or two.

You can see the living room where Lee and Grant sat, each at a different small table (although Lee sat at the nicer one), to sign the surrender papers.  The house itself is open to the public and there are several other town buildings maintained as part of the national monument.

Having seen where the Civil War began, it was good for me to see where it ended.  The film at the Visitor Center is a little self-congratulatory about how we as a nation were able to get on from the Civil War.  I think that's more true for some people than for others, but certainly President Lincoln and Grant took every step they could do bring the Confederacy - which was, of course, responsible for the deaths of several hundred thousand Federal soldiers, if nothing else -  back into the Union.  And it seems that Lee did the same on his side.  The fact that a lot of other people didn't go along with this plan (not the least of whom was John Wilkes Booth when he assassinated Lincoln) was beyond their control.

On my way northwest to Charlottesville I drove by a number of spots marked by signs indicating that they were places where Lee stayed either before or after the surrender.  After a while you stop looking at the signs because there were so many of them.  Did I mention how saturated Virginia is with history?

I had selected Charlottesville to stay for a couple of nights because it seemed like it was close to the Shenandoah National Park.  I was a little embarrassed to learn that it is also home to the University of Virginia and, of more interest to me, Monticello.  Not sure how I'd missed that, but I was glad to be here.

Monticello, of course, is the home of Thomas Jefferson.  It is a beautiful house that he designed and built, over several decades, sitting on top of a mountain where you can see views like this:

And this:

And I like this picture of the house because I took it from behind a tree:

Jefferson loved technology and included all sorts of gadgets in the home:  dumb-waiters for wine (what a great idea!), an indoor-outdoor clock that also tells you the day of the week, a writing machine so that when he wrote letters there was a copy automatically made - very impressive.  His book room (they don't call it a library for some reason) is the second largest room in the house, after the dining room which was arranged to maximize the ability of guests to have stimulating conversations.

In addition to the tour of the house, I went on a guided tour called Slavery at Monticello.  Jefferson wrote strongly and passionately against slavery, but, of course, he owned several hundred people over his lifetime.  At his death, he freed only five (of over 100) slaves - three people who were confidants or, you might say, senior managers, and two who were likely his sons from his relationship with his slave, Sally Hemings.  (Hemings had two older children, also presumed to be fathered by Jefferson, who were allowed to escape prior to his death.  Since both of them were very light complected, they were able to pass as white and have since disappeared from history.)

You never know for sure how a museum, dedicated to a person or a company, is going to treat material that shows its person or company in a less than favorable light.  I think the folks at Monticello do a good job of being fair.  They don't try to rationalize Jefferson's inconsistency, or try to evaluate it (i.e., "he was more good than bad, or more bad than good.")  Rather, they just present the facts - which include his considerable writings on the topic of liberty and slavery (which were important - he is arguably the reason we have religious liberty in this country, for instance) and also his behavior - owning slaves, and not even taking any steps to protect most of them after his death, when they were sold to pay his estate's significant debts.  Although he was generally pretty benign in his treatment of slaves - if you can get around the whole "holding people in bondage" thing - he was gone from Monticello a lot before his retirement and he employed white overseers who were brutal.

So you are left to mull this around on your own, and I guess that's probably the only way to do it.  History, like people, is sometimes both black and white at the same time.

Answering Important Questions

Turns out the Newport in Newport News, Virginia, comes from Christopher Newport, a naval explorer and founder of Jamestown.  Of course, that's not the question anybody really cares about with the name Newport News.  The answer to that second question is that nobody really knows.  Could be it came from the fact that he brought news to settlers in the area.  Could be based on the Old English word "Ness."  But the result is a name that is really fun to say, so I'm glad that somebody came up with it.

And let's not pooh pooh Captain Newport, who may be an ancestor of my brother-in-law's family, the Cooks.  Not the Captain Cooks (yes, I know that might be confusing) but rather the Noblesville Cooks; one of whom, Sandy, now lives in Newport News.  See?  It's like the Circle of Life.

Here is Christopher Newport, standing in front of the university that bears his name.  No word yet on whether relatives get reduced tuition, although I'm sure my sister and brother-in-law would be interested since they have three sons who'll be looking at schools in the next few years.

Newport News is on the James River, near where it meets the Elizabeth River and the Chesapeake Bay and goes into the Atlantic Ocean.  It's near Virginia Beach, which is on the other side of a tunnel that people spend their entire day planning around.  The tunnel is called the Hampton Roads Beltway - or HRB, or <insert expletive here> HRB.  Since it is the most direct route from the north to Norfolk on Interstate 64, it tends to back up frequently.  But on a Sunday morning, when Sandy and I were headed to Norfolk to see Cirque du Soleil's Quidam, we had no trouble.  As a result, we had plenty of time to check out Neptune Park at Virginia Beach which is accurately named.

Here's Neptune:

And here's the beach:

Yes, it was as fabulous as you assume it would be.  Big win.  Cirque du Soleil was good, too.

Sandy and her friend Bill, and my friend Ken, and TripAdvisor all said that the Mariners' Museum in Newport News is excellent.  And it is.  I spent nearly three hours there, which is more than twice the time I normally spend at a museum.  When Bill asked me what my favorite part was, I really couldn't answer because there were many good parts.  Even Congress thinks so, having designated it America's National Maritime Museum.

Some of the exhibits are "only" interesting and well done illustrations of maritime history.

For instance, they have a well done exhibit about Admiral Nelson.  They have a lot of information about steam ships, and a good history of shipcraft.  I was there on April 15, which was a year and a day after the 100th anniversary of the sinking of the Titanic, about which they have a good exhibit.  And they have a bunch of miniature ships built by a man named August Crabtree, a couple of which are shown here.

They have an exhibit featuring dozens of artifacts that literally are A (advertisements, angels) to Z (Zug, Switzerland, and the Zuiderzee in the Netherlands.)

The museum also includes the International Small Craft Center, a collection of several dozen smaller boats including a handmade boat made by Cuban refugees and, at the other end of the scale, a couple of Chris-Craft motorboats.  Laurie, I took this picture especially for you.

They currently have a temporary exhibit called Abandon Ship which is about what it's like to be stranded at sea.  This part of the museum doesn't exactly make you want to get into a boat, and there's a sign that says "might not be suitable for young children."  Agreed.

But wait, there's more.  Everything I've listed, plus some more, is only about 60% of the museum.  The rest is dedicated to Civil War naval history and conservation, focused on the great ironclad battleships of the Civil War:  the USS Monitor and the CSS Virginia.  These two ships faced each other during the Battle of Hampton Roads (I think it's funny that a naval battle is named "road" but there you have it - yes, yes, it's named after the town, I understand) with the result being a draw. However, the battle showed the overwhelming superiority of ironclad ships over wooden ships, and that was a sea change, if you don't mind my interjecting a pun, in how navies operated.  The museum has a large and excellent multi-media exhibit about this history.

They also have the Monitor herself, or at least a bunch of her, which is being restored/conserved there, after having been pulled up from the deep in 2002.  Here's a picture of a cannon being soaked in some sort of magical solution to help remove 150 years of corrosion.

Newport News is also near Jamestown and Williamsburg, but that will be the next post so be sure to stay tuned.  And I must show you a picture of what I found on my bed when I arrived at Sandy and Bill's - they set a very high bar for hospitality, and that doesn't even count amazing dinners.

Some of you serial readers may still wonder what a "voosier" is.  What kind of dramatist would I be if I had answered that question at the beginning of the post?  A voosier is a Hoosier who lives in Virginia.  Thank you, Sandy and Bill, not only for your great hospitality, but for adding another word to the English language.

A Capital Time in the Capital Even Though I Didn't See the Capitol

For a variety of reasons, my trip to Our Nation's Capital didn't include most of the sights that someone - including me - might have predicted it would.

First of all, my interest in tourism has waned a bit as of late.  I'm excited about getting on to Chicago and my emotional energy is mostly focused on that - although even during the apex of the Driveabout, there would be times when I needed to stop being a tourist for a couple of days.  And I was working on a proposal for our new business which was due while I was in DC, so that consumed a lot of time that otherwise might have been spent wandering around.

But one thing that I did do, twice, was get up very early with my friend Seema and head down to the Tidal Basin (about a half hour without traffic from their home in Chevy Chase) to take pictures of trees.  You see, I had coincidentally arrived during Cherry Blossom Mania 2013, at the peak of the blossoms and during a very nice couple of days.  (It was in the 80's and low 90's during the day.)  Our first effort, on Wednesday, was unsuccessful because we arrived about 6:15 a.m. (sunrise was about 6:30) and there was absolutely, positively no place to park.  It was mobbed with all sorts of photographers everywhere, their apparatus ranging from camera phones to professional equipment.  So we aborted and returned to Chevy Chase (picking up bagels on the way) in time for a conference call I had, but not before we drove around a while and I had a chance to see the Vietnam Memorial and take a picture of this very charming statue of Albert Einstein.

Having learned our lesson, we began maneuvers even earlier Thursday morning and arrived downtown at 0520.  No problem finding a parking place, and we got some great shots.  By "we," I mostly mean Seema, who uses an actual camera and actual technique.  I just point and shoot, but even I got a few keepers.  It really was a beautiful sight.  This is the Jefferson Memorial before sunrise:

Here's the Martin Luther King Memorial after sunrise:

And here's a cherry tree in full bloom:

We also walked by the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Memorial which was beautiful.  It has benches where you can sit and reflect.  Very well done. This is just one part of the memorial, which is made up of a number of walls similar to this one.

In addition to photographers, we saw a few small groups having picnic breakfasts - one couple was drinking mimosas from champagne flutes.  Quite elegant, in a "look how elegant we are" sort of way.  My photography skills, minor as they are, are not enhanced by mimosas, but I can see how taking a couple of pictures would be an excellent excuse for a picnic.

I dropped Seema off near a Metro station and went in search of coffee because I was going across the river to Arlington Cemetery later in the morning.  I had about an hour - not enough time to drive through rush hour traffic to take Seema home and make it back - so after coffee I went for a walk to see the White House.

I am embarrassed to say that I actually walked past without seeing it the first time, but then a security guard pointed me back in the right direction.  This time I paid attention and there it was!

I like this picture because of the tractor.  Sadly, I didn't think I'd have time to pop in and see whether Michelle was around, so I headed to Arlington.  Next time I'm in town I promise I'll call, Michelle.

My nephew, Ryan, who was visiting the capital with his eighth grade class from Noblesville East Middle School, was one of four of his class chosen to lay a wreath at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier.  This is quite an honor, and it is well deserved for Ryan who is a great kid.  Ryan, obviously, is the boy in the suit.

Arlington National Cemetery is a very powerful place, as you know if you've ever been there.  More than 400,000 people have been buried in the cemetery - mostly veterans, but also their spouses.  On my way to see Ryan, I saw the Kennedys' grave and the eternal flame.  I also came across Robert McNamara's grave.

I don't know why it's a different color stone than nearly everyone else.  Perhaps because he was responsible for so many of the other graves.

Yes, I said that.

After the wreath-laying ceremony, I was planning to join Ryan's class at lunch at the Pentagon City Mall Food Court, about five minutes from Arlington.  I should have accepted the teacher's invitation of a ride in their bus and then taken the Metro back to my car, but for some reason (heat stroke?) I thought it would be easier to drive myself.  Turns out that was a major miscalculation.  It is unclear to me how you build a suburban mall without obvious parking, but the people who built Pentagon City did it, and after driving around the mall several times I finally gave up.

To recover something from being in the area, I thought I'd follow the signs to the 9/11 Pentagon Memorial.  These signs take you through the Pentagon's parking lot.  There are signs that say "Pentagon Memorial Drop-Off Only - No Stopping or Standing" so I figured I was close.  The parking lot appeared to be for employees only, and then I saw a sign that instructed you to turn right for the memorial.  Only trouble was, that road was closed off, so I thought perhaps I had misunderstood where to turn right.  The next and only other right turn was back onto the highway - so there I was, back on the highway.

My experience in suburban Virginia is that their road system consists of streets from which recovery is difficult or impossible.  Make a wrong turn in DC and you're probably okay, although at certain times of day it might take you forty-five minutes to go around the block.  But in Northern Virginia, there is only one way to get somewhere and if you miss it you simply must change your plans.

Traffic issues aside, I had a wonderful visit with my friends Seema and Jane, who are terrific hostesses.  On Friday night I left Chevy Chase and ventured back into Northern Virginia to go to a 60th birthday party for Jim, who was my boss in my first non-Girl Scout camp job back, um, a few years ago.  The only person I knew at the party was Jim, and sometimes that kind of situation isn't much fun.  But there were several other former Omahans in attendance and I had a truly wonderful time.  Jim loves to golf and a friend made him a birthday cake decorated like a golf course, with brown sugar as the sand trap.  Confectionery genius.

Saturday was a beautiful day - rain on Friday had broken the heat, but it was still warm and the sun had returned - and I headed to Mount Vernon, which I had never visited before.

On the way I saw a sign for the Washington Grist Mill and Distillery and decided I couldn't pass up the chance to get some grist.  Turns out that was a good call.  Here's one of the guides explaining the milling process:

It's very pretty:

They even have the account book for 1799, which was the year of Washington's death although he made a lot of money from whiskey first.

For $5 you can go on a living history tour of Washington's mill and distillery, both of which are operational.  Do that.  For $17 you can see the mill/distillery and also get your ticket to Mount Vernon, where you can see Washington's home and tomb, and stand in a lot of lines and deal with a lot of slow-moving crowds.  I kept having  flashbacks to the Chattanooga Aquarium, although the sunshine kept me from becoming too foul.  I mean, you sort of have to see the Mount Vernon estate, but I was underwhelmed and preferred the mill tour.

Thus concluded my tour of the National Capital Region.  For those of you who care about these things - and I know that you're out there - I feel that this is a teachable moment for a point of grammar.  The word "capitol," spelled with an "o," means only one of two things:  a State capitol building, or the U.S. Capitol.  Any other use of the word "capital" is spelled with an "a."  Now you know.

And so I headed south to Newport News to see something called a Voosier.  You will have to tune in next time to learn what that means.