July 24, 2006: Williamsburg & Alexandria

I’m something of a history buff, but I’ve chosen not to subject my sons to too much of it on this trip. By my standards, we're giving short shrift to historical sites. We didn’t detour to Charleston, South Carolina, to see Fort Sumter, where the Civil War started in 1860. And we didn’t do as my aeronautical engineer father did and make a pilgrimage to Kitty Hawk on North Carolina’s Outer Banks, where the Wright Brothers made the first powered flight at Kill Devil Hill in 1903. We didn't visit George Washington's Mt. Vernon or Thomas Jefferson's Monticello or any of a dozen more places we could or should have seen. There will be time for them when the boys have grown, have studied more, and have cultivated a greater interest and motivation.

But I did drag the boys to one place that my father also took us: Colonial Williamsburg, a town Debbie had never visited. It’s home to the second-oldest college in North America, William and Mary, founded in 1693. (Harvard, founded in 1636, is the oldest.) Although Williamsburg residents have all modern conveniences, the town’s buildings have been restored as much as possible to their eighteenth-century form, inside and out. Hundreds of costumed people live and work there in historical style, recreating and explaining life in the colonial period for visitors. It’s a living laboratory for students of American history, and hordes of people come every year to observe and learn about the past.

We parked at the visitor’s center, perused its big bookstore, and then walked over a long bridge into the early 1700s, telling the boys we were using a time machine. We first visited a plantation, where we met a farmhand.

He was only too happy to let Danny help him weed the corn.

We met woodworkers who were understandably reluctant to let Tommy get his hands on their freshly-honed hatchets,

and a man who portrayed a slave. He showed us his one-room house, his chickens, his garden, and the mortar and pestle he used to grind corn.

We walked into town, past the grand Governor’s Palace

and the parish church. We heard an organist rehearsing inside.

We stopped at a few of the dozens of shops scattered about the place, where we bought some lemonade, ice cream, and gifts. Then we strolled along Duke of Gloucester Street, the main drag (to use a twentieth-century expression), shopped for toys, and wound up at William and Mary’s first structure.

The Wren Building, erected in 1695 and still in use, is the oldest academic edifice in the US.





Close by is Jamestown, site of the first successful English settlement in America, which contains an archeological dig and a huge museum with a reconstruction of the original stockade that protected the colonists in 1607. And just up the road is Yorktown, another historical city and the site of the final major battle of the Revolutionary War, where American forces besieged the British in 1791. The British surrender led to the Treaty of Paris and the formal recognition of American Independence. Alas, we didn’t have time to visit either of these sites.

For the student of history, visiting the area is like trying to drink from a fire hose. Everything has a story and is connected to a hundred other things. A short visit, while picturesque, only whets the appetite and impresses the visitor with his or her inadequate understanding and appreciation. The devotion of Revolutionary War buffs easily rivals that of Civil War enthusiasts.

Before we left Williamsburg, the boys helped Thomas Jefferson, who was composing the Declaration of Independence al fresco on the portable writing desk he invented. I like to think of it as one of the world's first laptops!





On the road, we switched from eighteenth to nineteenth century history. We drove west towards Richmond, captital of the Confederacy, and then north past Fredericksburg, site of the worst Union defeat (or the greatest Confederate victory) of the Civil War. We were late pulling into Alexandria, the suburb of Washington that is home to Debbie's cousin Elisheva, her husband Tobias, and their kids Margalit and Akiva. The latter two were sound asleep, but their parents welcomed us and showed us to our beds. Soon we were sound asleep, too.

Kind reader (to use a turn of phrase from an earlier age), bear with me for just a bit of twentieth-century family history: On our 1968 road trip, my father took us to Belvedere, North Carolina, a former plantation on Albemarle Sound near Norfolk, Virginia. His mother and stepfather, Birchen and Charlie, lived there before World War II. My grandmother was born in Texas in 1892, raised in Tennessee, and worked in Los Angeles at the Locomobile Company of America. There she met her first husband, an oil driller named Tom, and in 1915 gave birth to my dad, also named Tom. Birchen and Tom, Sr., were divorced soon after, and he went to Mexico and Venezuela to work in the oil fields there. During WWII, Birchen followed Charlie, her second husband and a Navy captain, who was deployed to places as far flung as the Finger Lakes in New York and Bremerton in Washington State. She joined Dad at Los Alamos in 1943 and after the war settled permanently in Southern California. She passed away in 1983 at the age of 90.

July 23, 2006: Interstate 95

Even more signs of the South:

• Pickled okra and boiled peanuts, sold at roadside stands

• Year-round fireworks stores

• A billboard from the John Birch Society: “Get the U.S. out of the U.N.” (Thought the JBS was dead and gone? Think again. They've just shifted their paranoia from communists to illegal immigrants.)

• Salt marshes

• Country music on the radio

• South of the Border, a roadside distraction just south of the state line between South and North Carolina (more about this below)

Exactly one month ago, we covered 630 miles in one day heading south from the northernmost state on the West Coast. Today we made the same distance heading north from the southernmost state on the East Coast. But I take more pride in today’s journey as I drove it solo, whereas Debbie drove the last two hours of the West Coast marathon.

We again spent time in four states on one day, and it rained persistently in all of them. Leaving Brooksville at about 10:30 in the morning, we headed up I-75, then left the freeway at Gainesville, a pleasant college town where we stayed for a few days in the ‘80s, when my college friend Maria was getting her doctorate there. We crossed to I-95 and joined the freeway just north of Jacksonville, which is the largest city in the US by area: a whopping 874 square miles!

Before we left the land of citrus for the land of peaches, I bought half a tank of gas. It cost $2.92 a gallon, but I thought I could do better in Georgia. And I did: $2.79 a gallon.

We started seeing billboards for South of the Border in Georgia, but after we passed Savannah, which lies on the south side of the river that separates Georgia and South Carolina, the signs became omnipresent. It seems like we passed hundreds of them, each more absurd than the last. When we finally neared the North Carolina state line, a panorama of neon greeted us. Under a Space-Needle-like structure surmounted by a stupendous sombrero, dozens of flashing signs advertised an ice cream parlor, a video arcade, a fireworks store, a drugstore, a gas station, a bowling alley, a hotel, a restaurant, a coffee shop, a beach shop, a leather shop, a t-shirt shop, miniature golf, pinball, cigarettes, pornography, and a hundred other items.

Pedro, the mascot of this tourist trap, was everywhere.

I didn’t need any of the items for sale, and even if I had needed them, I wouldn’t have wanted to purchase them here. But I felt compelled to stop and take a few photos, although they really can't do justice to the garishness. Yes, it’s ugly, it's stupid, it’s racist, it’s an affront to the senses and the apotheosis of bad taste, but one can’t help but admire the nerve of Alan Shafer, the lunatic who built and ran the place until he died five years ago at the age of 87.

Debbie told me that she recalled SOB (as it’s affectionately known) from her college days, when her cross-country team at Wesleyan took a trip to Myrtle Beach for spring training. She compared the place to the infamous Wall Drug, South Dakota, which we will no doubt pass on our way home.

I’m blogging tonight on our word processor, but I can’t post my words, links, or photos since the Internet is inaccessible at our hotel, the Microtel Inn in Wilson, North Carolina. This is the third time a hotel promising “Free Wireless Internet” has been unable to connect us to the web because its router was malfunctioning or transmitting a weak signal. I've tried in the room and the lobby both, meeting with failure every time. The clerks never have a clue what to do about it. Very irritating. Our room, moreover, is supposed to be non-smoking, but it reeks of poorly-masked smoke, and there are cigarette burns on the bedspreads and bathroom counter. Most hotels look nice enough on first inspection, but caveat emptor…

July 22, 2006: Brooksville & Homosassa Springs

Since we saw a lot of Asian and African animals at Disneyworld yesterday, it seemed only right that we take in some of Florida’s creatures today. Cousin Christine, her daughter Taylor, and Taylor’s friend Toby went with us to Homosassa Springs Wildlife State Park, one of a cluster of nature preserves on the northwestern coast of the Florida panhandle. Homosassa features a short river cruise and a small zoo of animals native to the state.

At the visitor’s center, we examined a two-headed turtle that has been living there for years. Two heads, no joke!

We had lunch and then took the cruise, which winds through the preserve and ends up at the zoo.

The park is famous for its manatees,

which visitors can watch from an underwater observatory,

but it also features alligators,

as well as otters, bears, bobcats, deer, eagles, and flocks of flamingos, egrets, and other birds. There’s even a 46-year-old hippo that was born at the San Diego Zoo, a former animal actor named Lucifer. Hippos are African, of course, but after the state took over the park and started transferring its exotic species to new homes, a public outcry convinced the state to grant an exception for “Lu.”

Rangers gave talks on the manatees as well as other animals such as the opossum, which really does play possum when threatened. It can rapidly lower its body temperature, emit a foul odor, and lie stock still for up to four hours.

We could hardly tear Tommy away from the reptile house. He stared for the longest time at a clutch of baby alligators, and at a skink, a type of lizard, wondering why a pair of toads of more-or-less the same size shared its enclosure.

Debbie thought the baby alligators were adorable, but Christine did not share her enthusiasm, since she has been trying unsuccessfully for several months to get an increasingly-bold, 12-foot gator removed from her back yard in Aripeka, a nearby town on the Gulf Coast.

We had dinner at a steak-and-seafood place in Hernando Beach with Aunt Claudia, Uncle Jim, Christine, her fiancé Don, Taylor, Toby,

and Cousin Scott and his wife Cindy, who is a social worker soon to receive her bachelor’s degree.





Among our appetizers was fried gator tail, which I tried for the first time. Yes, it did taste somewhat like chicken – with the light texture of fish – though there was too much breading for me to describe the flavor accurately. But I liked it.

Our conversational topics during dinner ranged from food and digital cameras to dogs and stormy weather. (We passed through a doozy of a storm on the way to the restaurant. Granted, we weren’t rained on at Disneyworld, but in general the Sunshine State has not lived up to its name this week.)

During their meal, the boys continued to pester the girls with questions about their religious faith, the existence of God, and other questions both theological and ontological, a conversation they started at lunch when they noticed Toby wearing a t-shirt from her Baptist church. The discussion-cum-debate only succeeded in puzzling the girls a great deal.

Things lightened up considerably when a rock band in the adjoining bar started playing and ten-year-old Toby decided to teach the younger children to dance. This charmed the adults no end.

After dinner, we invited everyone to visit us in Seattle, then stopped off for a short visit with Claudia and Jim at their new house. They always make us feel at home, and we really can’t thank them enough.

We finished Huckleberry Finn today, which was only appropriate, for tomorrow we start moving north. Huck suffers his crisis of conscience and decides he’ll go to hell rather than betray Jim, one of the most sublime moments in all of literature. The novel unfortunately loses steam at its conclusion with the contrived reintroduction of Tom Sawyer and his protracted preparations for freeing Jim. Why should Tom, so charming in his own story, be so tedious in this one? His fantasies are anticlimactic; they pale in comparison to Huck’s real adventures.

The novel’s coda is nonetheless wonderful, and I’ll probably feel the same way when I finish this blog: “…there ain't nothing more to write about, and I am rotten glad of it, because if I'd a knowed what a trouble it was to make a book I wouldn't a tackled it, and ain't a-going to no more. But I reckon I got to light out for the Territory ahead of the rest, because Aunt Sally she's going to adopt me and sivilize me, and I can't stand it. I been there before.”

I’m a little sorry to leave Florida yet again without indulging in the 1950s kitchiness of the famous mermaids at Weeki Wachee Springs, but the mermaid shows are part of an unexceptional water park that we had no interest in patronizing. And I suppose we should also regret not devoting time to lazing on a Florida or a California beach. But we vacationed for nearly a month in Hawaii last year and spent many days swimming and snorkeling and lying on the sand. This trip has a different sort of focus.