Wednesday, September 30, 2009

New York City



The Big Apple! We found this to be one city you have to experience to even remotely begin to comprehend. It’s been fun being on sensory overload the last two days!

We arrived north of the city on Saturday night (Sept 20th) and decided to stay in a hotel for our time here. We felt it was worth it to have good nights rests and hot breakfasts. A hotel room feels pretty spacious after the motorhome.

Sunday morning we went to a Baptist church here in Nanuet and it was good to worship and reflect. We all were tired and needed a day of rest so just stayed at the hotel, watched TV, worked on the blog, played games – it was wonderful.

Monday morning we drove into the city. Manhattan is so huge -- compared to Philadelphia, D.C. or Seattle – the downtown area is so much bigger. It just goes and goes and goes. High-rise after sky-scraping high-rise. The cabs, subways, noise, people, smells, lights – when you stand on a street corner and realize that everything you are seeing and sensing is being multiplied on hundreds of other street corners within the same downtown area, you have this feeling that it’s like a huge, multi-tiered anthill that never stops moving, crawling, producing, expending energy. We experienced Times Square on Monday and Tuesday nights and it was as bright as day and teeming with shoppers, business people and partiers. Hard to express what this city is like.

Some of our New York highlights – the Statue of Liberty and the beautiful views of the city from her pedestal; New York pizza; viewing the Twin Towers site and the Firefighter memorial at Station 10; Times Square at night; a picnic and carriage ride in Central Park; riding the NY subway and double-decker bus; sausage dogs from a sidewalk cart; watching outdoor chess and backgammon games; walking down Wall Street and shopping at Macy’s. Regrettably, we did not get to see a play – maybe next time.




Macy's, Empire State Bldg. and Wall Street



Times Square and our carriage ride in Central Park



NY Dogs and chess




Engine 10 and Ground Zero


Just kicking back for a day

Tuesday, September 29, 2009

Philadelphia


After Amish country, we found a Marriott near Philadelphia for the night. Yay for Marriott hotels and a sister who can get us good rates! These periodic stops at hotels have been such a blessing on this trip, especially close to the big cities. Mom & Dad’s van has been a big blessing, too. Often we leave the motorhome at the hotel or park it somewhere outside the city and then all drive in the van. That’s been working out great.

Our history brains are getting full! It feels like all the early events of our country are right at our fingertips and we’re trying to grasp them all while we’re close. Philadelphia is really the cradle of many important aspects of our country and we got to tour the building where enlightened thoughts and ideas were hashed out – Independence Hall. Here the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution were signed. George Washington sat in the chair with the rising sun, presiding over the Constitutional Convention, and the room still looks the same. The Liberty bell no longer hangs from the steeple, but is in a building right next door. We had watched “National Treasure” with the kids a few weeks ago, and they’ve had fun finding the different areas where the movie was filmed as we go to all these historic places.

We saw City Tavern where General Washington and others would hang out and where Paul Revere rode in with the news that the British had closed Boston Harbor. This building had burned at one time, so it’s been rebuilt exactly from old plans. We were in the courtyard of Betsy Ross’ house and talked for an hour with a lady who was in costume as Ben Franklin’s daughter. She gave us wonderful information on Betsy, Ben, and others in the town. Saw Ben Franklin’s grave and walked by Christ Church where George Washington worshipped. We couldn’t go inside as a wedding was taking place.

For lunch we found the original Philly cheese steak joint (Pat’s King of Steaks) in south Philly and stood in the line that wrapped around the building. We discovered it was worth the wait if you order it the local way – with cheese whiz. The restaurant was in a part of town with skinny streets lined with row houses. Had to walk several blocks so got a little feel for that kind of downtown living. So little green, so much concrete…it seems like it would be hard to be a kid here.

After spending the day in Philadelphia we drove on up to NYC, passing right by Princeton University. That’s a beautiful area. We stopped at an ice cream parlor called Friendlys because there had been a milkshake bet as to which car would see an Amish buggy first. The motorhome lost.


Independence Hall


Taking a break with Grandma & Grandpa/E. helping Luke with his Jr. Ranger project



Walking the streets of Philly to find Pat's Philly Steak sandwiches


Talking with Ben Franklin's "daughter" and the Franklins gravesite

Saturday, September 26, 2009

Gettysburg & Amish Country

Loie writing here – with a starting note about leaving Assateague Island – our last night there was VERY windy so Steve and I decided to sleep in the van instead of in our little tent. The wind was blowing so strongly we doubted that it would stay up through the night, or that we would be able to sleep with it flapping around us. Taking it down, in the dark, with the sand blowing stingingly, was a challenge, but probably laughable if you had been watching.


After driving just a couple of hours north to Gettysburg, we first watched a narrated diorama of the three days of the Battle of Gettysburg which took place in July 1863.
Then at the visitor center we hired a guide – a very knowledgeable and interesting older man named John – who drove us in our van around the whole battlefield (18 miles in all) explaining the strategies and movements of the union and confederate armies over the hills and valleys and farmsteads. Since the area is a National Historic Site, it looks much the same as it did 150 years ago – fences, stone walls, even a building with a cannonball embedded in a wall and a barn with a large cannonball-sized hole in it. There is a still-functioning Lutheran seminary whose buildings were used as a hospital during that terribly deadly battle (10,000 men lives lost; 60,000 casualties) Scattered over the several square mile area are 1300 different monuments commemorating various states, armies and leaders. Luke was impressed with how many cannons there were.

This is what they call a "Witness Tree" -- at Gettysburg during the Civil War

The fields over which "Pickett's Charge" occurred


NEXT DAY – AMISH COUNTRY
Camped that night at a beautiful, forested Pennsylvania State Park. Then the rest of the day we drove and wandered about the delightful little Amish town of Bird-in-Hand. A large farmers market featured lots of meats, cheeses, produce, baked goods, quilts and other sewn items, and handicrafts. Steve and I spent some time at the Mennonite Visitor Center where we learned the history of the Amish and Mennonites (both divisions of the Anabaptists originating during the Reformation) – very respectfully presented. We all enjoyed seeing the large prosperous well-kept farms, usually with full clotheslines, and the unique methods of transportation they use – bicycles, scooters, and of course one-horse buggies. I saw a boy mowing a large lawn with a pony-drawn mower. By a shop in town some of us watched a boy of about 10 and a younger boy – around 4 – back up a parked horse and buggy, hook a Radio Flyer-type wagon to the back , then both climbed into the buggy and the older boy went driving off down the busy street alongside cars. Mike, Anne & the kids drove around in the countryside and found a few roadside stands at Amish farms. They really enjoyed getting to visit with one mother and daughter in particular and bought fresh farm eggs, beets, sweet corn, tomatoes, and homemade root beer.




Sharing the road with horse-drawn transportation




Tabacco drying in an Amish barn



These farms are beautiful and the grass is mowed like this



This was my personal favorite :)

Thursday, September 24, 2009

Assateague Island, Maryland



From the kids’ viewpoints…

“After Williamsburg, we drove down and over the Chesapeake Bay Bridge which is 18 miles long. After we got on the island, it was late and we went to bed. Next morning we woke up to some ponies in our front yard! After that we went into town and got a boogie board and when we came back we played in some really big waves.” ~Ben

“It was very fun at Assateague Island. I like the horses.” ~Luke

“We arrived at Assateague Island on September 15th and got in late that night to a state park on the island. The next morning, we woke up to a family of three ponies in our camping area. It was fun to be able to get so close to them, but it was also sad that they weren’t as wild as they should be. There were signs up everywhere that said not to feed the ponies but it was obvious people had. One of the ponies even came up to Ben and nudged his hand. Another animal we saw there was an interesting crab. We found out they were called ghost crabs. We assumed this was because they were murky white and only came out at night.” ~Elizabeth

“We woke up the first morning to wild horses in the campground! It was so cool to see them just wandering around. We swam in the ocean both days we were there. Luke and I had fun playing in the small pools of water because the waves got to be too big for us. We also made a pile of sand and tried to keep it from being washed away by the little waves left over from the big ones. I had a great two days!” ~Adri



Horseshoe crab shell



Fun in the waves



The wild ponies of "Misty and Stormy" ancestry



Throwing our rock we took from the Pacific into the Atlantic



Sunrise over the Atlantic

Sunday, September 20, 2009

Williamsburg, Jamestown, Yorktown


We left Washington, D.C. on Monday, Sept. 14th, and headed down to Williamsburg, Virginia, to step back in time. Mom and Dad decided to skip this part of the journey with us and went to Virginia Beach instead to visit some old friends. Our plan was to stay one day at the old colonial part of Williamsburg and then see Jamestown and Yorktown the next day.

Williamsburg -- now this was a treat to the senses. You truly do feel like you're in a time warp when you get into town and so many are dressed in costume, carriages and horses clop along the streets and many of the shops produce wares by 18th century means. Many of the town's homes and businesses were there when George Washington, Patrick Henry, and Thomas Jefferson walked the streets as Virginia delegates. We thought it was definitely worth paying the fee to go into the authentic shops and be part of the Revolutionary-era drama that takes place in the streets. Especially when we got in for an extremely reduced rate as it was "homeschool week" -- another blessing we didn't know in advance. We enjoyed touring a silversmith's home and learning about their family life. They lost everything by adjoining themselves to the patriot cause and refusing to import goods from England. Mike and the boys especially enjoyed visiting with a gunsmith who made muskets by hand. You can buy one for a measly $15,000.

We decided to eat dinner at a pub there in town, Chowning Tavern. It was delightful! The food was very good and English in style. A magician and a musician (both very talented) entertained us as we ate. We were loathe to leave at the end of the night and I really wished we had another day here to get to tour more of the shops and talk with the people.

We stayed again in a Wal-Mart parking lot overnight and then headed first thing over to Jamestown. We didn’t pay to go into the re-created town but went instead to the actual site of the fort which is a national park. Seeing the area where the first permanent English settlement began was interesting. Not a lot at this location, but we watched a short video in the visitor center and then walked around for a while imagining the hardships and struggles and looking at John Smith and Pocahontas’ statues. There’s a cordoned-off section where they’re doing an archeological dig of the fort.

Next we headed to Yorktown. All three of these towns/sites are within a 10-mile radius so that was nice. Again at Yorktown we opted to go to the original site instead of the re-created “Yorktown Victory Center”. Walking and driving around the still-standing earthworks that the British and Colonial armies dug and touching the cannons left there made this last battle of the Revolutionary War seem very real. In the evening we left Virginia and headed up to Maryland where we met up with Mom & Dad again.


Making candles


Drying tabacco/ a friendly red ox



A flintlock rifle and the Revolutionary drama



Our dinner entertainer and a new form of grounding :)


Jamestown



Yorktown