Virginia on my Mind

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We arrived in Washington DC on time, after being behind time for much of the trip; I don't know where and how Amtrak made up the time. We ate lunch at Union Station and then picked up our rental car. The parking lot at Washington DC Union Sation is quite extensive, we had quite a difficult time trying to find the rental car, up a couple of floors and across a bus depot. We got our car, a Nissan Cube and off we rolled. There was a terrific rain storm as we left the parking lot, I mean the rain was coming down as hard as rain can. And through this, we had to negotiate Washington DC traffic and find our way out of the city and south to Richmond, Virginia. Kris drove the Cube, I navigated. There was a lot of commuter traffic far out of the city; quite astonishing just how far people are prepared to drive to work. We drove about 50 miles south slowly in rush hour traffic, gridlock for miles and miles. The rain eased and we turned off the road into a small historic town of Occoquan, Virginia. We pulled into the tourist information centre and got some information. We then moved on having a better sense of direction, and a better sense of where to stay in Virginia. We drove south a bit faster and faster as we got further from Washington DC, further away from the commuters. We drove into Richmond, Virginia at least 3 hours after we left Washington, driving a distance that should have taken two hours or less without traffic. We stayed at a Holiday Inn, and used a discount coupon we had picked up in Occoquan.

Richmond is an historic city, and the capitol of the Confederacy during the Civil War; now we are in the south. Once you cross the Mason Dixon line accents change, and so does the price of items. Everything goes south, accents and prices. Here we have a large statue of Robert E Lee, Confederate leader and just outside of town a shrine for Stonewall Jackson, a Confederate General. We drove around Richmond admiring the statues and old buildings. Driving around Richmond is a bit of a frustrating challenge because many roads are one way, you can't make many left hand turns and there are several boulevards with divided lanes. Around and around we rolled in our Cube, but we got a good overview of Richmond in the process of trying to navigate our way. The architecture is a rather bland and haphazard mix of old and new development, some of the old south is preserved, and some is not. And perhaps rightly so. Some of those old historic houses are just gorgeous, red brick and white columns surrounded by plenty of green and leafy trees. We drove past the old White House of the Confederacy, the exterior has not been kept well, it isn't as white as it could be, and it's completely boxed in by the hospital of the University of Virginia. We went to dinner at a downtown restaurant, and I ordered salmon. I'm not sure why I had travelled all across the country only to order salmon. And you know what? I had to send it back because it was undercooked. Should have ordered the biscuits and gravy.

The next morning we drove through town one more time looking for statues on Monument Avenue, and the Museum of the Confederacy, but in the end we settled on upon IHOP out of town. It was time to move on from Richmond. We drove west on a very scenic Interstate 64, tall trees line each side blocking any development, making it seem as if Virginia is completely rural; it isn't. Northern Virginia is just an extended suburb of Washington DC, and there are plenty of monster sized non descript buildings with plenty of secret activity going on inside. We drove to Charlottesville to visit Monticello, Thomas Jefferson's stately home. We bought out tickets and took the shuttle up to the house on the hill, just in time to get a tour of the plantation life at Monticello. While Jefferson wrote the Constitution he also owned slaves. And it's widely believed that he fathered a child or two with one of his slaves. The guide showed us where the work house was, the living space, the smith, and the room for sewing. Slaves grew some of their own food to suppliment their meagre rations. Those slaves who showed promise as teenagers were "promoted" to life in the house as cooks, stablemen and even personal butler. We wandered around the gardens and admiring the house. Look at an American 5 cent nickel, Monticello is on the reverse. We entered the house by another tour. It's not too large, but well designed for the space available. Kitchens and privy are outside and underneath the large veranda. It's a symmetric building with the main building being the centre and extending off from the sides toward the back are two verandas each with a small building, and under the verandas are various rooms for cooking, storing wine, making beer, stables, curing meat and toilets. It took Jefferson most of his life to complete the entire building and grounds. When Jefferson died he was in debt and the house and his slaves were sold. There is a small gravesite at the edge of the property, and Jefferson is buried there in a tomb fit for a President. Monticello was owned and lived in by another family for 100 years. The house has been in trust to the Foundation since the 1920's.

After the tour of Monticello we drove to Shenandoah National Park. We drove along the Skyline Parkway during the late afternoon and into sunset. This narrow park follows the Blue Ridge Mountains. The drive is slow as it twists and turns, and there are plenty of turn-offs for photos. It was very hazy, a product of pollution out of state. There are so many trees, and most deciduous, it must be absolutely spectacular during the autumn when the leaves turn. Here in the height of summer it was lushious and green. And the sounds of crickets and cicadas, the soundtrack of the south. It wasn't steamy hot though because we had some altitude, over 2000 feet, certainly not high by western standards but it was so nice to have the windows down and feel the fresh air instead of being holed up inside an air conditioned car cut off from the outside. We took our time stopping frequently, stopping for numerous photos and stopping to have some food. The traffic was light as this time of day, nothing like the grid lock we experienced at Yosemite National Park. We saw three deer grazing off to one side of the road. We kept driving slowly until we ran out of light, and then took off west out of one of the few western exits to the town of Harrisonburg. We had room service dinner because it was late and we were dead tired after such a long day.

The next morning we took the Interstate north than runs parallel to the Shenadoah Park and was clear of the Blue Ridge Mountains in no time. We then headed east and found Manassas National Battle Field, after getting off at the wrong junctrion and driving through a couple of Washington DC suburbs complete with extensive malls and big box stores. Just on the other side of the Interstate is the open field clearing that saw two battles during the Civil War. The first Manassas Battle in 1861 was the first major battle of the war and sent the Union North into retreat, this despite that the Confederate South lost two generals. The second Manassas Battle in 1862 is called Bull Run. There was a reconstructed house, real cannons, wagons and fences. We missed the musket firing that happens every day at noon, and missed by a few weeks an entire battlefield reconstruction and re-enactment. This battle field was very interesting to wander about, and it completed my southern experience. I spent a while looking through the books at the small giftshop, and decided on two cookbooks. The weather was co-operating for our two day trip through the south. The rain storm we experienced two days earlier cleared the air and brought cooler and dryer air from the north. The south is lushious and green, not because of this cool air, but because of the humidity, heat and sunshine more typical of the southern summer. We left Manassas and drove back to Washington DC to drop off the car. We stopped off at Arlington National Cemetary before we left our Cube at the train station, but I'll write about this in the next blog about Washington DC.

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