Day 81

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Posted by: Onaxthiel: We camped the previous night in a place called The Turkey Swamp, a county park towards the center of New Jersey. The park is the most expensive place we have camped in the almost three months we have done on the road, but was also one of the best equipped. Every site has electricity (though that is mostly useless for us.) and there is a very well maintained bathroom, shower area, and laundry facility, as well as a slop sink that does quite well for dishes. Of course, we didn't find out about the fact that there are good washing facilities until we were done doing our dishes in the regular way we do, and had broken one of our pots. To many nights of heating vast quantities of water to do dishes and to much stress on the handle finally combined to tear the spot welds free from the pots side. We set up the poncho hooch just in time. Within 20 minutes, the rain was coming down heavily. We stayed mostly dry though the night, but didn't quite pull it off. At least everything was dry in time to get wet for the next night.

The reason we had stopped at the Turkey Swamp in the first place was because of its' proximity to the Monmouth battlefield. This is a famous battle due to it's size, The American's victory there, and for Molly Pitcher, a young woman who manned a cannon after her husband, a member of the gun crew, was wounded. After the battle was over, Washington made her a sergeant at half pay, and she drew a pension from the government for her service after the war. We didn't spend long at this battlefield, as it was soaked from a night of rain, and the area didn't seem to have all that much to see other than its' visitor center. The visitor center had a few interesting fats though, such as the fact that different paintings of Washington show him differently facially with some regularity, including that some artists showed him with different eye color. They also have a brief display about the first re-enactment of the battle that was held, way back in the 1840s. I admit that this is a bit earlier than I had thought people were doing re-enacting, but I suppose gear was more available back then, anyway.

After this trip, we headed for Princeton, both for a revolutionary battle, and also because there is an Ivy league school there, and we like to keep adding those notches to our belts. Now Obfuscator and I can say we have been to Harvard, Yale and Princeton. The battle of Princeton is commemorated by a huge memorial in town square, approximately located approximately where Gen. Rochambeau had his troops encamped prior to the battle, and a glorious monument it is. It features an overwrought Washington on a panicked horse, while lady liberty hands gets felt up by a Continental soldier. At least that's what it looks like.

Arriving at the battlefield we were stuck by two things. Firstly, what a lovely field it was. A gentle slope up to a farm house that has stood on the grounds since around a decade prior to the fight was what the American's had to defend. The British were camped in the open field a few hundred meters away. In the middle of the lawn there once stood an oak tree, the one General Mercer had been wounded beneath by the bayonets of the British. If the folk story is to be believed, he was ordered to surrender after his capture, and he refused, and so he was stabbed each time he refused until the American forces pushed the redcoats from the field, and took him to the home at the top of the field for treatment. This was to little to late, and he died of these seven stab wounds. On the opposite side of the field, near to where the British camp was, is a set of colonnades. These columns are free standing, with no apparent purpose upon cursory examination, like some unusual transporter destination in the original series of star trek. We kind of expected to hear a disembodied voice start speaking from above, and then demonstrate its' omnipotence before making an unreasonable demand, but such never occurred. The site is the New Jersey answer to the tomb of the unknown soldier. 36 unnamed American and British troopers lie right behind the pillars, untended but serene. No guards, but still remembered by anyone who bothers to look.

The next town on our route was Trenton, known as both the capitol of New Jersey and the site of Washington's' crossing of the Delaware to capture Hessian soldiers on Christmas day two hundred some odd years ago. On the way in, we stopped at the state militia museum. I had high hopes of it celebrating the New Jersey minute man, or at least all the national guardsmen. It was not to be the case. Mostly the old National guard armory we visited (old enough to still have good luck swastikas on the floor tiles!) was, in fact, devoted to the NG unit that currently occupied the building, an artillery battalion. They had a civil war museum, and an every other war museum, but really nothing specifically devoted to the state militia, except this particular Arty group. The wall hangers on display from other wars were in some cases quite unusual pieces. For instance, a German Sturmgewehr and MG-42 on display, as well as Maxim machine guns left over from the first world war. On the whole, not a bad little set of displays, just not what we had expected.

After this detour, we went to the NJ state house. The state calls their the longest continually used state capitol in the nation. The way this was accomplished was by constantly adding new wings as often as needed. The original statehouse from the 1790s is now just a hallway and the governors office. On all sides, this wing has been surrounded by expansions. From the outside, this gives a strange impression, as instead of the one overarching design Obfuscator and I are accustomed to seeing at state houses, we saw five buildings of different eras and styles all mashed together into a chaotically utilitarian design. Our tour guide was a kindly older lady that put up quite well with our hounding her with questions, and even looked up the answerers to a few really odd ones we threw at her. High points of the tour included the recently restored dome (not as nice as Pennsylvania's, but still impressive) the governors office and their original Edison lamps, and the Jersey Devil carved into the panel in front of the speaker of the assemblies desk.

Right next door to the State Capitol are the barracks of the German speaking soldiers that Washington crossed the Delaware to neutralize all those years ago. The structure is still somewhat original, both in style and in much of the original brickwork. Mostly, the only parts that have been replaced were wooden accoutrement and mortar between bricks. We were given a solid set of informative tours and lectures by the reenactors at the barracks and thought the stop was worthy of the eight dollars admission. I wish we had had more than the hour and a half we were able to stay, though.

We set our sights on Atlantic City, home of Monopoly and the Miss America pageant, knowing full well we wouldn't make it that evening. Driving into our camp in a state forest for the night, we were inundated with fog. It was rather spooky, really. A chill, but not really cold night. A mist so thick that turning on our head lamps just gave us a lit up wall of watter droplets for a few feet in front of our eyes. The damp that penetrated any layers of clothing. And the knowledge that this was the turf of the Jersey Devil, rumored to have inhabited this part of the state for around three hundred years. It was actually easier on the eyes and imagination to turn off the headlamp and walk the forest nearly blind, the stars and moon completely obscured by the enveloping fog. With the light on, I kept on wondering what was just beyond the tiny cone of light my head lamp was illuminating. I was also painfully conscientious of how a head lamp put out a huge marker to anyone else in the woods as to where your head is. All in all it made me a bit jumpy. I was more than ready for sleep by the time the drizzling started.

Lessons Learned: Make sure the Poncho hooch goes up early on any night you think there might be an issue. The night previous, we REALLY got pounded by rain, and would have been quite soaked without the combination bivvy/ poncho. As it was, the rain was just a slight nuisance. Had we started putting up the hooch twenty minutes later, we would have been working in the rain. At places with facilities, check them out fully before doing unnecessary things like boiling water. Mist gets on/ in everything when it is lying around, so make sure that items of gear you may keep on you that rust are sealed in waterproof cases prior to even leaving your vehicle for the night, IE: I wonder if the moisture I found on my cell phone this morning will make much of a difference?

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Photos

Thomas Clarke House
Served as a field hospital, following the Battle of Princeton

General Mercer's Oak fell over in 2000
He was a popular guy, and the story goes that he sat mortally wounded under the now gone oak, until the battle was won.

This is Peter Vroom
Not only was a New Jersey governor, but he also invented the Race Car Noise. True story.