June Trip Recap!

Even though it's July as I write this (and August, probably, until it goes up!) I've finally finished my June trip posts and wanted to show off a bit of a June by the numbers!

States Visited in June: 8

1. Washington (obviously!)
2. Florida
3. Georgia
4. South Carolina
5. North Carolina
6. Virginia
7. Maryland
8. Pennsylvania

Miles driven in June (estimate): 904 miles.

1. Atlanta to Philadelphia, 798 miles.
2. Philadelphia to Harrisburg, 106 miles.

Miles flown in June (estimate): 9,945 miles.

1. Seattle to Tampa via Chicago, 2,727 miles.
2. Tampa to Seattle via Atlanta, 2,586 miles.
3. Seattle to Atlanta, 2,180 miles.
4. Harrisburg to Seattle via Philadelphia, 2,452 miles.

Total miles traveled in June: 10,849.

Nights spent in hotels: 12.

Nights spent at home: 18.

Eep!  That's a lot of travel, especially considering that all of these trips started halfway through June.  Just wait for July's recap to put this to shame... driving miles, at least!

-Beth

Trip 05: Harrisburg, Pennsylvania

The very first day we were in Harrisburg, PA, we went exploring - we didn't have too much time, and we wanted to try to see as much as we could!

Harrisburg is Civil War territory, which is probably why the National Civil War Museum is there.  We went out the same afternoon we arrived in town and managed to make it into the museum before it closed.  

It was a fantastic museum, with lots of great exhibits, and there were some reenactors out back who showed off troop formation and rifle drills.  We had a ton of fun exploring it.

We talked about waking up early the next morning to go to Gettysburg, which was only about a forty minute drive out of town.  Unfortunately, our event the next morning was too early for us to be able to make it back on time, so we didn't get out to see the National Park.  Sad day!  So close and yet so far...

But we had an event, which went off beautifully, and then it was off to the airport for our first break from everything!  We flew back home for the 4th of July, and got almost a full week back in Seattle to rest and recuperate and prepare for the long haul... which I'm still in as I prepare this blog post!  We don't have internet access too often, so I'm trying to write posts as best I can.  

Our June trips, looking back on them now, were fairly calm and pretty well spaced out.  Our July trips... well, let's just say things were busier!  More on that to come...

-Beth

Philly Day Trip: Valley Forge

On our last day in Philadelphia, we packed everything up and drove all of five minutes down the very road our hotel was on to visit Valley Forge National Park, where George Washington and the Continental Army spent the winter of 1777-1778.  I was really excited to see the park - the eighth graders had watched a DVD on it during this past school year, and I've read a few books set in that time period.  I thought it would be a lot of fun to see it all first-hand.

The park is basically a valley (hence the name) surrounded by what folks back east like to call "mountains" but the lot of us Westerners call "hills".  Two ridges connect behind the valley, with a river on the other corner, and the troops built up fortifications around the remaining side (which has a great view of Philadelphia).  The Park Service has a road that runs all around the edge of this valley, with a bit of a joiner road between right down the middle, and you can drive your car through the ten to twelve miles or so and stop at all the exhibit points.

Part of the Valley... with a cannon and dirt fortification from an old watch point.

So how did we decide to tour the park?

Mine's the one up front!

By bike!  We pulled up to the park and saw that you could rent bicycles, so we decided that would be the best way to see as much of the land as we could.  While Valley Forge is, contrary to what one would expect from a valley, definitely not flat, it was an amazing way to see the whole park.  I really got a great feel from the land and the way the terrain spread out.  In a car, I don't think I would have realized the sheer expansive domain of the place - but on a bike, every half mile or so I'd pass a sign that would commemorate which company camped in that particular location of the valley, and I'd realize just how large that winter encampment must have been.  In a car, it takes barely a half hour to go around the park and you don't really understand what it must have been like before cars - on bikes, we spent four or five hours just to traverse the valley, and it definitely gave us a better feel for the terrain and what it must have been like to be a soldier trudging around on foot (or even an officer on a horse!).

Standing by a reconstructed cabin.

We stopped everywhere we could, in part because we were all so curious about everything and in part because I, at least, hadn't been on a bike in a few years!  The reconstructed cabins were small, but not as bad as I'd expected - they'd be crowded with six soldiers in them, but not unbearably so, and they looked like they wouldn't been too bad to weather a winter inside.

Valley Forge today is very grassy, with just bits and pieces of woodlands scattered throughout it.  Apparently it wasn't that way when the Army arrived - within the first few weeks, anything that could be used for building or firewood was torn down and put to use, and the valley was apparently a mud pit for months afterwards.  It's incredible to think that parts of it still haven't recovered after more than two hundred years.

See those nice clouds?  They neglected to rain on us, drat them.

It was of course a very hot day - somewhere in the eighties, with the humidity about as high.  We all were hoping for the threatened rain, but it held off and we simply suffered in the heat.  We stopped at a huge archway erected in honor of the soldiers from that winter, which had all of the generals listed on it - it was fun to later look at my pictures and match the generals to the people I'd read about in my books!

We also stopped at the Washington Chapel, a church inside the valley itself.  It had some beautiful stained glass artwork (which of course photographed horribly) and had a different window dedicated to each of the states.  More importantly, it was holding a flea market outside and we were able to buy water, hot dogs, and ice cream - we hadn't planned on biking through the park (and thus through lunchtime) and we were by then famished!

Still, the highlight of the whole tour definitely had to be visiting Washington's headquarters at the far end of Valley Forge.  We passed what had once been the muster grounds, where the Army learned drills from the Prussians, and went another three or four miles into the valley, where we found the house George Washington rented out during the winter.  Keep in mind, rented - that's important, when part of what the patriots were fighting for was the right not to have to billet soldiers in their personal homes!  (Remember the Third Amendment, anyone?)

They were actually excavating in the backyard, archaeological grids and all...

It was a gorgeous three-story brick house about 200 feet away from the creek, with a barn to the right of it.  The whole downstairs was converted into central command, except for that little part jutting out to the left of the house - that's actually the detached kitchen, connected by a covered passageway, so the oven and hearth wouldn't overheat the house in the summer!  All the rooms were restored and furnished with antiques that would have been used back then, and it was an absolute blast to walk through the house and see how things would have looked (social historian that I am, I loved it).

By then, we were tired, hungry, thirsty, and had spent far more time than we'd planned exploring the park.  So we headed back to the Visitor's Center to return our bikes!

Not before multitasking and photographing while biking...

It was an absolutely perfect way to visit Valley Forge.  Despite my aching legs, it really gave me a better sense of the land and what it might have looked like back in 1777 - and of course, the park itself is simply gorgeous, regardless of the historical events surrounding it!  We saw more than a dozen deer as we were going through, and being just away enough from the main road and the cars, we weren't too troubled by huge crowds of people at any point (bugs, on the other hand...).

Coworker D and one of the rare shady spots on the path!

Still, we were famished, so we weren't too sad to leave Valley Forge.  We returned our bikes, hitched up the trailer, and headed out on the open road for an afternoon drive to Harrisburg, PA... where we'd skip forward in time from the Revolutionary War to the Civil War!

You can tell I'm a history person when I keep track of where I've been by what happened there long before I ever arrived...

-Beth

Philly Day Trip: The Old City

Our first free day in Philadelphia was Friday - and it was my third full day off in the month of June, so you bet I was ready to do no work at all!  We walked to the mall, took a bus to the train station, and took the train into downtown Philadelphia, where we walked to what everyone calls "the Old City"... revolutionary Philly!  The funniest part of the trip in was at the train station, where D bought the newspaper after we realized that J's picture was on the front page from our event yesterday... I was on the cover, too, but he earned a spot above the fold, so there was much hilarity at his expense!

Our goals for the trip to the Old City were simple: see Independence Hall and the Liberty Bell.  Other than that, we didn't really have any plans.  So we stopped in at the Visitor's Center as soon as we arrived to grab our free tickets for the Independence Hall tour - the tickets are free, but you have to have one to enter the building and they "sell" out quickly.  We arrived about 10:30, and our tickets were for 3:30 that afternoon, leaving us hours to explore the historic district before it was time for the tour.

There's a whole "historic district" that makes up the Old City, and most of it is actually part of a National Park (Independence National Park, I think, or something like that).  It was a bit funny to be seeing Park Rangers in the middle of a city!

We picked a direction and were off, with no real plans as to what we'd find.  We wound up seeing an old Quaker meeting house, one of the first fire stations in America (complete with a Ben Franklin statue), the Betsy Ross house, and Elfreth Alley (apparently the oldest residential street in America).  

The Quaker meeting house.

But the real highlights were Christ Church Cemetery, and a few blocks later, the actual Christ Church itself.  Benjamin Franklin and five other signers of the Declaration of Independence are buried in the cemetery, including Dr. Rush.  It was a fantastic place to visit, and well worth the $2 admission fee - the graveyard was beautiful, surrounded by an old brick wall to keep it separate from the more modern city beyond it.

The main pathway in the cemetary.

There are over 4,400 people buried in this tiny cemetery, but only 1,300 or so markers remain.  Most of the markers are made of slate, and the etchings on them are in various stages of legibility due to the passing of time (and acid rain, I was told).  The oldest legible stone dates from 1723.

Most markers were about as worn as this one, of a husband and wife.  Some had little plaques put up to show what the inscription had been before they wore away - the man in charge of the cemetery in the 1840s copied down as many inscriptions as he could before they vanished.

There were several signers of the Declaration of Independence buried in Christ Church Cemetery, and for the most part people had put little American flags next to their graves to identify them.  But at least one of them was buried in an unmarked or unfound grave, and of course the most famous occupant of the graveyard is Benjamin Franklin, who is buried right by the fence (at his request, actually, so people don't actually have to enter the cemetery to see the gravestone!).  People throw their pennies onto his slab... I guess they didn't pay too much attention to that whole "a penny saved" thing!

We really enjoyed exploring the cemetery - it was very pretty and peaceful, in an elegant old type of way.  Because we liked it so much, we decided to carry on down the street to go to the actual church it belonged to: Christ Church, where a number of the founding fathers had attended services.  

The bell tower at Christ Church.

The church was impressive, though fairly plain - such an old brick building.  We were all really impressed by how skilled brickworkers back then had been!  The grounds around the church were very pretty, with more tombs and slabs in honor of Philadelphia's older citizenry, including a few more signers of the Declaration. 

 I wound up buying a book about the signers in the church's book shop: .  It's a look at all the different signers of the Declaration of Independence, and what their lives were like leading them up to 1776 and what happened to them afterwards.  I read it on the plane back from Harrisburg, and really enjoyed it.  I'm going to be using bits and pieces of it with the 8th graders next year, I think, as it's exactly the right tone for them: a survey rather than a huge comprehensive study, full of odd little memorable facts and tidbits that make life then very real, and with just enough humor that they shouldn't be too bored.  I know I liked it!

From Christ Church, we decided to work our way back towards Independence Hall.  We stopped in at a used bookshop at J's recommendation, and I found a reprinting of the old Primers used in schools through the 1910s, grades 1 through 6.  I'm going to keep it on my desk at school for the kids to flip through when they don't have work to do... the level 6 primer contains readings I didn't do until college, so I'd love to see what the kids make of their "below my grade level" books!

We stopped by Elfreth's Alley (and doesn't that sound like something out of Harry Potter?) to see what residential streets of the 1700s looked like.  The answer?  Narrow!

Elfreth Alley, typical house width: nine to sixteen feet.

By then, it was well past lunch time, so we stopped for a classic Philly cheese steak before continuing on.  We passed Locksley Alley, which looked just as old and narrow as Elfreth:

We still had about an hour before our tour of Independence Hall, so we decided to stop by a few of the other buildings in the area.  We went through a security check to enter the U.S. Mint, and poked around the Constitution Center but didn't enter the exhibit (we weren't willing to pay $12 to stare at displays for the half-hour we had before our tour!).

Instead, we went back to the Visitor's Center so I could pick up another book: .  I read this on the plane back from Harrisburg, too (what can I say, I devour books and it was almost five hours of flying!).  I really enjoyed it, and got through the military history all right, but the best part was really looking at the Battle of Boston and seeing the differences between the British Redcoats and the American Continental Army.  I wish it had continued on past 1776 - it stopped right after the Battle of Trenton, and I would have loved to see it take on the Southern Campaign and the Battle of Yorktown.  But then, I'm a history nerd!

And as a history nerd, I was of course thrilled when we were able to head into Independence Hall for our tour.  We had the loudest ranger ever as our tour guide, but he did a great job telling the story of the building, both as the Pennsylvania government building and as Independence Hall.  

The room where the Declaration was signed, and later the Constitution.  The chair in the center in the back is George Washington's chair, with the "rising sun" of the Constitution!

It was really, really neat to see firsthand the room where everything took place.  Afterwards, we went out into the courtyard behind the building, and reenactors recited most of the Declaration of Independence (they left out the List of Grievances, otherwise it would have been very long!).  It was honestly amazing - the first time a reading of a political document has given me chills.

That seemed to be a great culminating point of the day, so from there we bought smoothies to fight the heat of the day (about 85 degrees, with a drop in humidity to only 90%) and went back to the train station for the trip back to the hotel, where I promptly began reading my book about the signers.  I'm predictable!

Oh, and we did see the Liberty Bell, too, as it turned out - you could either wait in a really long line to enter the building it's housed in and file past the the bell, or you could sneak around the back to see it through a plexiglass wall.  Guess which one we decided made more sense?  Yup, we didn't bother to wait in line, and decided we were all good with seeing it through a glass wall.  Maybe that's why I was a bit underwhelmed by it - yes, it's a cool bell, but honestly it didn't make that big of an impact on me!

Over dinner, we set our plans for the next day: we'd explore in the morning, and then after lunch we'd pack everything up and drive out to Harrisburg.  Where would we explore?

Oh, just a little National Park about two miles down the road from our hotel called Valley Forge...

-Beth

Trip 04: Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

All things considered, I enjoyed Philadelphia far more than I expected to!

We arrived about noon, ending our multi-day trek north from Atlanta.  Our hotel was right across the street from our event location: the King of Prussia Mall.  It's apparently the largest retail mall in America (the Mall of America is the largest mall, but doesn't count as a retail mall because it has a rollercoaster... or something like that), and having seen roughly half of it, ohmygosh it's huge.  We wound up using the mall for it's Rite Aid (in a mall!) and food court and air conditioning, but that place was pretty high class and absolutely huge.  It was basically two different two-story indoor malls, both huge, connected to each other by a walkway crosswalk.  Seriously, the mall had city streets running through the parking lots, it was that big.

Anyways, we arrived and settled in nicely, because our event was the very next day in the afternoon.  We still went out early in the morning to set everything up, and finished in time to run into the mall for lunch and an air-conditioned reprieve from the 97% humidity of the day.  Eek, is all I have to say to that!

The event ran fairly smoothly, though S had to leave to catch his flight back home halfway through things.  We managed to do the take-down one man short, and then the on-site agents in Philadelphia offered to take us out to dinner.  So we spent dinner having really great burgers and discussing all the different places we should see while we were in Philadelphia!  It was great to have the local advice on everything, and we plotted out the next day and half to take advantage of everything we had available to us.  R flew home that night, so it would be just D and J and I exploring the city!

We had an absolute blast - so much so that our day and half of exploring deserves two whole posts of their own!  So stay tuned... more to come!

-Beth

Trip 03: Atlanta, Georgia... and travel!

A cross-country flight early in the morning saw me arriving in Atlanta, Georgia by early evening their time, all ready for the start of my longest trip in June.

I have absolutely no idea what mountain this is - Rainer, maybe?  It was early in the flight across the country.

I flew into town the day before our event, so it turned out that I didn't have a chance to see much of the city beyond the parking lot we had our event in.  Still, you get just such a sense of history out there - we were chatting with our waiter at dinner that first night, and he told us about some of the houses in his neighborhood, where Dr. Martin Luther King Jr's father had preached, and stories of the Underground Railroad.  I really regretted not being able to see more of the city, but it turned out that our event was in a pretty cool parking lot... Well, as cool as parking lots can get!

We were just across the street from Turner Field, where the Atlanta Braves play.  The day before I flew in, my coworkers J and D actually went to the parking lot to scope out the site and decided to go to a Braves game on a whim... and tickets were only a dollar!  We were marveling that to park right in front of the stadium in the very first lot only cost $12.  Try getting that price in Seattle or San Diego anywhere within a mile of a major stadium!  But alas, the rest of us missed out on baseball.

Turner Field.

The other neat thing that we could see from our parking lot was at the end of the street: the 1996 Atlanta Olympic Park.  We were right by the archways leading into the park, and could see the old tower where the torch was displayed.  I remembered seeing it on tv back in 1996, so it was pretty cool to see live!

If you squint, you can totally see the torch tower...

Atlanta wound up being even hotter than Tampa, and even more humid.  We were in the parking lot for the morning, and had to be out by 2 in the afternoon as there was a baseball game that night.  We'd decided that our goal would be to try to pack up everything after the event finished at noon in record speed, so that we'd have time to walk across the street to see the old baseball stadium (they had the old walls up, and markers where the bases had been) and down the street into the old Olympic Park.  But media showed up late, so we didn't even get to start packing up until after 1pm... so much for that plan!

The sun came up at about 6am... and it started getting hot at about 6am!  Coincidence?

This was the first event where we really noticed the effect of the heat and humidity.  We had those little neckerchief things that you soak in water to help cool yourself down, and boy, did those feel good for five minutes!  Still, at the end of the afternoon, the effects of the heat were really slowing us down.  We were being good and downing water and trying to keep ourselves cool, but as we were finishing up, it was almost comical how slow we were all thinking.  The entire trailer was loaded up except for a few last-minute things (coolers and inflatable pool toys, among others) which usually just get wedged in where there's room at the end of things.  This time, we all kind of stared at them for a while before we remembered what we were supposed to do with them!

I wrote in my journal: News reports put it at 93 degrees, but the car read 101 degrees - it sure felt like it!  I finished 5 bottles of water and a Gatorade by 10am, and just kept chugging the rest of the day.

How to tell it was really, really hot out... this is what I look like after packing up an event!
Such a glorious tan line from the neck of my uniform shirt...

Needless to say, we didn't have time to explore the area, which was a bit of a bummer.  On the other hand, we were all really grateful for the air conditioned vehicles!

We left directly from the parking lot in Atlanta, heading north for our next event in Philadelphia.  Because of laws about how long we could drive the trailer, we knew that we could only stay on the road for a few hours.  We were hoping to make it to Charlotte, North Carolina, but between a stop at Starbucks (seriously, our crew is so obviously from Seattle: it seems like we can't go a day without finding a Starbucks for coffee!), a weigh station, and a gas stop, we only made it to Greenville, South Carolina.  Each stop only made us more grateful for the AC in the cars... man, it was hot and humid!  My coworker S's glasses actually fogged every time he stepped out of the air-conditioned Tahoe, it was so humid.  In my journal I noted that each time you open the car door you just feel the heat like a brick to your face.  It's impressive.

We got to stay at the Hilton in Greenville... living it large!  Plus, because the company books so many rooms a year, our rooms were all bumped up to nicer rooms.  This means I stayed overnight in a corner room with floor to ceiling windows on two walls and a king bed.  Pretty swanky for a girl who'd never even had her own hotel room until that first Ephrata trip last month...

I am my father's daughter: I take pictures of my hotel rooms.

It was such a relief to be in an air-conditioned environment... and one with a shower!  I'd sweated so much from the heat that there was actually dried salt on my skin.  We met up after everyone had showered for a much-needed dinner - most of us rewarded ourselves with steak and potatoes after such a long, hard day of work and travel!

The next day we packed up and hoped to make it into Philadelphia.  However, since we're traveling with a trailer, the trailer drivers are subject to all the laws commercial vehicles must obey, among them being one that restricts the people driving to just eleven hours of driving out of a fourteen hour day.  Between the hour limit, some traffic in Baltimore, and the trailer not being allowed on the parkway, we didn't manage to reach Pennsylvania that day either - we wound up scrambling a bit for a hotel where we had to stop due to time, and spent the night in White Marsh just outside of Baltimore.  It made for a long day, with a bit of stress trying to find a non-booked-full hotel at the end of the day when we realized we weren't going to make it to Philly.  We had a late, exhausted dinner with everyone too tired to talk much, but the day was brightened (pun intended!) on the drive home.  I got to see FIREFLIES!

I know, I know, but come on, we don't have those out West. 

On the third day we did manage to finally make it into Philadelphia, making Pennsylvania the sixth state of this leg of the trip!

Entering the Baltimore Harbor Tunnel.

The drive was, overall, really not that bad despite the fact that it stretched longer than any of us had planned.  I'm not yet qualified to drive the trailer, so I only took my rotation driving the Tahoe.  I rode almost the whole trip with S and D in the Tahoe... and both of them are ex-cops, so I heard all sorts of stories and learned tons of new acronyms on the drive up!  We also listened to XM radio, which I'd never experienced before.  Both of my co-workers are about Dad's age, and they found a station that had all the music that I'm sure Dad would just love listening to and made me think of him the whole way up.

See?  Green!

The drive was really pretty.  It was a divided freeway almost the whole way up, two lanes on each side with a big grass median and a ton of trees and rolling hills as far as the eye can see on either side of the road.  Going through as many states as we did, we noticed that North Carolina takes far better care of their roads than the other states - they had far less potholes and had really pretty yellow and orange flowers (that were hardy enough to survive the heat!) alongside almost every exit.

What really surprised me about the drive, though, was just how green and isolated everything was.  The sides of the road are literally so tree-lined that you can't see through the treeline more than ten or twenty feet - all you can see is forest, and beyond that just rolling hills and more forest.  I always assumed that everything "back East" would be settled land: old farms and towns, roads everywhere, cities sprawling out with all the people that had to move West to escape the crushing population and spreading industry.  But there was a lot of completely unused land... literally just green hills as far as I could see in either direction, with exits few and far between and what was off of those exits fairly small and unassuming.  

I always assumed that pretty much everything East of the Appalachians (or, well, the Mississippi) was all old, settled land, full of people and with every square mile claimed, and this was the real impetus for the push West in the 1800s.  Not that I mind being proved wrong, mind you, it was just funny to see all my preconceived notions of the East vanish into hills and hills covered in trees!

I also kept a fairly impressive list of things we passed that I wanted to  do more research on - mainly historical sites, but every now and then we would pass a place that I didn't know too much about, so it made it onto the list.  Expect to see more about this later!

And with that, I will leave off with us arriving into Philadelphia, city of history, really big malls, cheese steaks, and 97% humidity (not kidding).  More to come next time!

States Traveled To So Far: 8 (Florida, Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, Virginia, Maryland, Delaware, Pennsylvania)  (We were across the river from New Jersey, but I wasn't actually in it, so I'm not counting just seeing the state in this list... just states I was actually in!)

-Beth