We have found that the importance of hotel location varies from city to city.  In Washington, D.C., for instance, you want to be in the heart of the city, or close to the Metro.  In Richmond, on the other hand, we chose a hotel on the outskirts of town, since we could drive easily in the city, and saved money over hotels downtown.  In Charlottesville we did the same thing and it worked out just fine.

We checked in to the DoubleTree at dusk.  If it wasn’t as opulent as the Willard, it was at least clean.  It had the usual frills, like flowers in the lobby, but it also had an indoor pool right in the middle of the building.  That was neat.  Our room had two beds and a tidy bathroom.  As was the case everywhere we went this trip, we barely stayed in our room five minutes–long enough to put our bags down and wash up–before heading back out to have fun.

Charlottesville is a university town, and it shares many of the traits common to university towns: a young population; a large, centrally-located campus; a small, charming downtown; abundant pizza restaurants; etc.  We drove around just looking at stuff before parking the car and walking to the pedestrian-only Main Street.  It was obviously once open to traffic, but now is an enchanting brick mall dotted with tables, benches, and planters, with shops and restaurants lining either side.  We spotted two movie theaters, two ice cream shops, numerous bookstores and clothing shops.  There was even a stationary store and a store for crazy cat ladies.

We ate dinner at Christian’s Pizza.  The first bite tricked me, and I thought we’d made a bad choice.  But my tastebuds had fooled me, and instead I found the pizza delicious, with surprisingly crispy crust.  I drank Dr. Pepper for some reason.

We walked up and down the promenade, looked in an antique shop, stopped for ice cream, and in general had a fine time before setting off again to explore more of the town.  We drove up and down random streets not looking for anything in particular.  Away from Main Street the city was quiet.

The campus of the University of Virginia is handsome, complete with the requisite number of statues, athletic facilities, and brick buildings to make it identifiably collegiate.  But unlike any other campus in America, the University of Virginia is a UNESCO World Heritage Site.  It was designed by Thomas Jefferson himself, and the older buildings and grounds are charming as can be.  It was late in the evening, but we walked all around in spite of Miriam’s “tourist torture”-related foot injury.  We came upon two lovers on the steps of the great rotunda.  They dispersed when they perceived that I wanted to climb the stairs to see what was up there, and I thought they had run off to a dorm somewhere.  But when we were walking back from the other side of the building–the side that faces the great lawn–we perceived that the lovers were, in fact, hiding down in a courtyard.  We left them alone.

Day Five

Our main interest in Charlottesville was, naturally, Monticello.  The home of Thomas Jefferson, of course, is a popular tourist attraction that becomes very crowded in the summertime, and only a limited quantity of tickets are dispersed each day.  Our initial hope was to see Monticello in the morning, and be on our way back home by the mid-afternoon, which would have us pulling into our driveway between one- and two o’clock in the morning.  But we found that the earliest we could get tickets to see Monticello that day was after noon, so we had some time to kill.

We went first to breakfast at Cavalier Diner, which was a total mom and pop sort of place.  I ate many biscuits.  Then Miriam explored a stand-alone Anthropolgie store she had spied the night before.  It was huge.  We had checked out of our hotel already, so all that was left to do was drive up to Monticello.

Sunday was the day before Memorial Day, and I really felt I would like to go to Arlington National Cemetery on our way out of Washington.  Unfortunately for us, thousands of bikers had the same idea, and all the streets heading that direction were closed.  Traffic was extremely congested, but the weather was nice.

We had checked out of the hotel and paid our parking bill earlier.  I had made a quick trip through the White House Visitor’s Center, in a wonderful old building just across Pershing Park from our hotel, and purchased and mailed some postcards.  We were both hungry.

Miriam is especially fond of a D.C. restaurant called Open City which we frequented while on our last trip.  We were staying at the Omni Shoreham then, so Open City was the closest possible restaurant to us.  From the Willard, however, we had to drive.  I was looking for Connecticut Avenue, but missed it somehow, and we soon found ourselves in the residential neighborhoods north of downtown.  It was interesting to see how busy the shops and restaurants were: the sidewalks were packed with people going this way and that.  We got back on track, found our way to Open City, where I let Miriam out to reserve a table while I found a place to park.  The latter was no easy task, since the National Zoo is in that neighborhood, and the holiday and nice weather had everyone out and about.  I ultimately found street parking on the most pleasant lane I’d ever seen.  A mother and daughter were gardening in front of their house, and I asked the lady to summarize the parking rules for me.  Parking on one side of the street was reserved for a church four four hours on Sunday, but I’d be fine on the other side.  So I moved the car–right next to an awesome Corvair–and made my way to the restaurant.  Miriam was still waiting outside when I arrived, and we had to wait many minutes more.  But it was worth it.  Open City is charming and bright.  Indeed, the long wall of windows can be totally opened on nice days.  The food was as good as we expected.  We walked together back to the car, remembering our earlier holiday when the area around the Woodley Park-Zoo/Adams Morgan Metro stop was our turf.  If we ever move to Washington, we tell ourselves, that is where we’d like to live.

Driving out of the city was bittersweet: we were sad to leave with so much still left to do, but we had so much left to do elsewhere.  (Actually, it was bitterangrysweet, since the traffic was a nightmare and the bikers were outrageously loud.)  But we soon crossed the Potomac and were back in Virginia heading west on Interstate 66, passing Arlington, Falls Church, Tysons Corner, Merrifield, and Centreville.  I had a strong urge to exit in Manassas to visit the national battlefield, but resisted, mostly because I knew it would consume the remainder of our day, and we were determined to reach Charlottesville.

Somewhere near Gainesville, Virginia, I got it in my head that I would like to see Shenandhoah National Park.  I have always wanted to see it, actually, but couldn’t imagine a circumstance in which I would, since I knew it was unlikely to ever be a destination in and of itself.  But since we were so close, and since my free traveler’s map of Virginia (which I got at the visitor’s center) showed me it was a very minor detour en route to Charlottesville, I changed course slightly, and we headed south into the rural heart of western Virginia.  It was beautiful, actually.  Farms and fields stretched out in all directions around us, and the road passed over rolling hills for miles and miles.  The road itself–Highway 211, or Lee Highway–was in excellent condition, and traffic was very light.  We stopped for drinks and fuel somewhere near the ominously-named Amissville, but even that was nice.  We reached the western edge of the national park with plenty of time to meander down the Skyline Drive and still make Charlottesville before dark.

Shenandoah National Park charges admission, but I had no objections whatever, since I’m sure the National Park Service isn’t as well funded as it ought to be, and, in any case, I’ve wasted fifteen dollars on worse things countless times.  Anyone who has traveled along the Blue Ridge Parkway in North Carolina will understand what driving through Shenandoah is like.  The only difference is that at the overlooks on the west side of the Drive, you look out over the Shenandoah Valley, and see the fabled river meandering along.  I kept thinking of the old, sad song:

It was a gorgeous day, and though the park was not crowded per se, there were plenty of cars enjoying the same drive.  We stopped repeatedly to explore the various overlooks, both facing east and facing west.  It was late in the day, and the lower angle of the sun combined with haze down in the valleys made the mountains look blue.  As the day wore on we determined that further stopping would be inadvisable, so we continued south down Skyline Drive, through mountains, through meadows, past animals, and so on, until we reached Highway 33, where I thought it wise to leave the park and head back southeast to Charlottesville.  There is a more southerly exit to Shenandoah National Park that would have spit us out near Interstate 64, but the extra miles along Skyline Drive would have easily taken an additional two hours.  I was satisfied with what I had seen.

As we drove back east toward Charlottesville, the high mountains began to gradually disappear behind us, until we were once again in the midst of rolling fields and farmland.  We made good time on the open roads and soon enough were at the northern edge of Charlottesville.

When Miriam had finished her work we set out for the Smithsonian, to finish our survey of the National Museum of American History that we started the day before.  It was noticeably more crowded on Saturday than it had been Friday, but we were determined to see it all.

We went straight upstairs when we arrived and toured an exhibit about the military history of the United States.  Every war was represented along with its technology of battle.  They had more guns than I could count, including one used by John Brown’s men at Harper’s Ferry.  I was impressed by George Washington’s sword,  Andrew Jackson’s sword and coat, and William Tecumseh Sherman’s sword and hat.  Most amazing of all were the table and two chairs used by Robert E. Lee and Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox Court House.  In effect, the Civil War ended on that small oval-shaped table.

I was similarly thrilled to behold three Medals of Honor in a small glass case.  I had never seen one in person before.

Being the Summer of Baseball, I found myself jealous of President Warren Harding’s free pass to all National League ballparks.

There was a great deal of interest in a small exhibit of American pop culture items upstairs, and understandably so.  In separate glass cases near one another were the Ruby Slippers and Kermit the Frog.  The younger visitors seemed less interested in Fonzie’s jacket and Archie Bunker’s chair.

Still, the most memorable artifact in the entire Smithsonian Institution wasn’t the most popular.  Indeed, Julia Child’s kitchen and the exhibit of first ladies’ gowns were far and away more crowded.  In the middle of the museum is a doorway to a dark hallway.  Dim lights on the floor lead you around the corner, where, behind thick glass, spread out across a raked platform, lay the Star Spangled Banner.  The real one.  The one Francis Scott Key saw when he wrote the poem that, when set to music, later became our national anthem.  Miriam and I sat for quite a while staring at the enormous flag.  It was simply awesome.  (Photos were not allowed.  Sorry.)

Satisfied that we’d seen just about everything, we set out.  It was still light outside, so we walked down Constitution Avenue, past the National Archives and the Newseum, to the entrance to the National Gallery of Art.  I really wanted to see the Calder mobile and David’s portrait of Napoleon, but, alas, the museum was closed for the day.  (I reassure myself that the museum will always be there, and we are sure to visit Washington again in our lifetimes.)  We walked briefly along the Mall, then turned north, and enjoyed the amazing architecture of the city as we made our way back to the hotel.  I love old buildings, and Washington has lots of them.  Along our route back we ran across a shop Miriam wanted to explore, so I left her and went on to do more sight-seeing of my own.  The sun was setting, and I took a walk past our hotel and a fancy statue, down to see the White House again.  Though I think the north side is handsomer, the south lawn is impressive.

We rested in our room for a while before heading downstairs where the doorman hailed us a taxi that drove us to the FDR Memorial.  It was night, and some of the inscriptions on the memorial’s walls were difficult to read in the dim light.  But it was a large and suitably noble tribute to the man who led this country through the Depression and Second World War.  Unlike other memorials, this one attempts to place Roosevelt’s presidency in context.  Visitors move through the site–which is expansive–along a chronologically-oriented path.  The president is depicted in a wheelchair.

The night air was cool, and there were plenty of people around, so we elected to walk toward the other monuments along the western portion of the National Mall.  We arrived shortly at the Lincoln Memorial, which I suppose is busy any time of the day or night.  We sat for quite some time at the top of the steps, looking out over the reflecting pool to the Washington Monument and Capitol in the distance.  The moon was full or nearly full, and was just coming up over the line of trees to the southeast.  We walked down through the Korean War Veterans Memorial and the World War II Memorial, then across the Elipse to the northwest.

We had walked approximately six billion miles since the start of our trip, so Miriam was understandably fatigued.  Given my tendency to say things like, “oh, it’s not too far; we can walk”, and her tendency to wear stylish, yet impractical shoes, she had reason to complain.  She joked that I was subjecting her to “tourist torture”.  She felt better, though, when we made a return visit to the Old Ebbitt Grill.  It was late, and we had no reservation, but they still seated us at a lovely table within view of my new favorite painting.  I was still full from eating Five Guys (for the first time) eight hours before, so I just had ice cream and a Sprite.

We got back to our hotel room well after midnight and I slept like a baby.  In the morning we were leaving Washington.

Memorial Day weekend is probably always busy in Washington, D.C., but it was made more so by the presence of tens of thousands of bikers, who rode up and down the city streets–with no apparent single destination, from what I could tell–generating an incessant rumbling noise with their motorcycles.  The major attractions would be doubly crowded because it was a Saturday.  While Miriam got some important work done on the computer in the room, I left the hotel to run some important errands.

My first chore was to check on the car, parked in a garage on G Street.  They had a sign indicating something to the effect that vehicles could not be left over the weekend, or that patrons had to pay every day.  The fellow in the booth told me, however, that it was fine to leave it as long as I like and just pay on my way out.

From the garage I walked a few blocks down to try and get tickets to Ford’s Theater – not for a performance, but for the tour and museum.  The line in front of the building was quite long, but it was full of people who already had tickets.  I asked the National Park Service ranger what to do, and she told me I should see inside if anyone had returned tickets for the day.  Luckily, someone had, and we had a scheduled tour of the theater and museum later that afternoon.

On my way back to the hotel I was walking behind a tourist family with three kids.  Two girls were throwing a superball back and forth to each other.  Not surprisingly, the ball got away from one of the girls and bounced out into the street, which sloped down so that the ball began rolling away.  One of the girls, without even looking, began to run directly into the street.  Her parents caught her, thank God.  Her older brother took off down the sidewalk to grab the ball before it went into a drain, and he came back up with it.  The second of the two girls, who had been watching him, began to cross the street after her parents, also without looking.  I could not believe how foolishly the whole family was behaving.  Though I know it wasn’t what Darwin had in mind, I could not help but think that the concept of natural selection was on display at that moment.

Abraham Lincoln had been on my mind a great deal throughout the summer, and especially on this trip.  I was reading David Herbert Donald’s excellent biography at the time, and my former reverence for the great man was turning nearly to idolatry.  I was desperate to see places and things associated with Lincoln, and that is what took us that afternoon to Ford’s Theater on 10th Street.  Visitors are first led down a narrow staircase to a basement-level museum, which contains many Lincoln-era artifacts, and many items owned and used by the Lincoln family.  A shaving mug, in particular, stood out to me as an object that Lincoln would have used on a daily basis.

As you might expect, a great deal of attention is paid at Ford’s Theater to the assassination of President Lincoln, and the exhibits thereto pertaining are both fascinating and disquieting.  The conspirators who joined John Wilkes Booth were armed to the teeth, and only their cowardice and incompetence prevented the government from collapsing altogether.  Lincoln wasn’t their only target: Vice President Johnson and Secretary of State Seward were on the hit list, as well.  Of course, Booth succeeded in killing the only man who mattered, and it is hardly any mystery how he did it.  The presidential box in Ford’s Theater is amazingly accessible.  It’s impossible to imagine this today, but to reach his box that night (and every previous night he had attended), Lincoln had to walk up a flight of very public stairs, across a very public balcony, and through a door visible to half the audience.  He had one guard with him, though having more might not have kept Booth out.  He was a famous actor whose work Lincoln knew.  He would surely have been admitted.  On the other hand, had General and Mrs. Grant accepted the Lincolns’ invitation that night, security would have been much tighter, with army guards stationed inside and outside the box.  Alas, Mary Todd Lincoln’s jealous tirades had appalled Julia Grant, and she wanted nothing more to do with Mrs. Lincoln.  In a glass case in the Ford’s Theater museum, the tiny single-shot pistol that took Abraham Lincoln’s life sits inanimate.  No object so small ever caused more harm.

The most meaningful artifact at Ford’s Theater is not a gun, however.  It’s a long, black Brooks Brothers overcoat.  Abraham Lincoln wore it to Ford’s Theater the night he died, but, more importantly, he wore it a few weeks before, at his second inauguration, where he delivered the greatest address of all time – the speech in which he articulated his hope for “a just and lasting peace”.  Stitched inside the silk lining of the frock coat are two embroidered eagles and the words “One Country, One Destiny”.  It is amazingly poignant.   In the rush to keep up with the museum tour, most visitor’s to Ford’s Theater probably miss seeing that coat in its display case in the lobby.  It’s a shame, too, because it plainly symbolizes the beliefs of the man who single-handedly saved the Union.  Many other men fought and died in the Civil War, but had anyone else on earth been president of the United States between 1861 and 1865, my visit to Washington, D.C. would have required a passport.

Miriam had a great deal of work to do back at the hotel that afternoon, so I took the opportunity to walk by the White House once again.  I had never seen it in daylight.  Pennsylvania Avenue is closed in front of the Executive Mansion now, and it is actually hard to imagine that cars were ever allowed to just drive right on by, since the pedestrian traffic alone makes that a bad idea, and the short distance from the road to the north portico formerly made an Oklahoma City-type bombing distinctly possible.  (Note to Secret Service personnel reading this page because internet-crawling supercomputers flagged it for containing specific word combinations: I love America and am not threatening anything or anyone.  Please don’t come to my house.)

Speaking of maniacs, just across the street from the White House is Blair House, a handsome building with a flag hanging from just above the second floor.  That is where President Truman lived while the Executive Mansion was being renovated in the late-1940s.   One day some crazy Puerto Rican nationalists attacked the house but were repulsed by police, one of whom, Leslie Coffelt, was killed.  There is a plaque out front commemorating his sacrifice.  Next to Blair House is Lee House, built in 1858.  It’s neat to think that when Abraham Lincoln moved to Washington in 1861, he could look across the street from a White House window and see his neighbors’ brand new brick home.

And while standing in front of the White House I couldn’t help but think about the last speech Lincoln ever delivered.  It was on 11 April, 1865, less than a week before he died.  The War had just ended and the streets of Washington were full of revelers.  The president spoke from a second story window to a large crowd assembled out in front of the mansion, which in those days was open to anyone.

He alluded to the presence of the band, and said that our adversary had always claimed one old good tune–”Dixie”–but that he held that on the 8th of April we fairly captured it – in fact, he said, he had submitted the question to the attorney general, who had decided that the tune was our lawful property; and he asked that the band play “Dixie”, which they did.  The President then proposed three cheers for General Grant and the officers and men under him, then three for the navy, all of which were given heartily, and the crowd dispersed.

We see the White House on the news every day of our lives, and it is perhaps inevitable that it has mostly come to represent the idea of power, and even government itself.  So it is easy, then, to forget that the White House is a physical place – a large house in the middle of a busy city where men both corrupt and incorruptible have lived and worked.  Some of these men we think of only as two-dimensional faces on coins and currency; others we forget altogether.  We will never forget Abraham Lincoln.  He is, in a way, immortal – the embodiment of wisdom, virtue, honesty, and honor, and everything we wish America itself could be.  But Lincoln was a living, breathing man who, like all of us, had his own flaws.  We needn’t mythologize him.  On the contrary, Lincoln’s greatness stems not from some inherent perfection, but from his capacity for personal growth.  The man who had once said that he would let slavery be if it would save the Union later came to believe that the War must be about “a new birth of freedom”, and rejected Confederate proposals to rejoin the Union with slavery intact.  He worked diligently to ensure the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment.  “I shall adopt new views so fast as they shall appear to be true views”, he said.  And when his true views made him profoundly unpopular he said, “I desire so to conduct the affairs of this administration that if at the end, when I come to lay down the reins of power, I have lost every other friend on earth, I shall at least have one friend left, and that friend shall be down inside me”.  Abraham Lincoln was a living, breathing man, and his last home was the large white house in the middle of a busy city.

Miriam is obsessively thorough in her research of hotels, so we knew in advance that our room in Richmond contained a small refrigerator.  This was good news, since she always has leftovers from dinner, and getting two meals out of one is a good way to save money on the road.  Alas, we awoke to the disappointment of finding our room’s refrigerator not cold at all.  When we went to the desk to complain the clerk explained that they unplug the appliances when guests check out to save energy.  That’s a fine idea, but I wish they’d told us in advance.  Miriam’s breakfast was lost.  Fortunately, the regretful clerk offered us their buffet for free.  I made my own waffle, and placed it atop a mountain of bacon.  And, in spite of the refrigerator blunder, the hotel was quite nice and a good value.  By the end of the day, however, we’d be sleeping in a hotel so opulent that it would make even the fanciest of hotels seem like a Bangladeshi sewage treatment plant.

We were packed into the car and heading back north on I-95 as soon as we finished breakfast.  Our destination was Washington, D.C., but in the mean time I was excited to be traveling through the real heart of the Civil War.  The names of towns, counties, and rivers that we passed along our route stood out to me as landmarks in some great historical atlas.  I vividly recall the roadsigns for battlefields seeming like a chronicle of the War’s progression: Fredericksburg, Gaines’ Mill, Wilderness, Chancellorsville, Spotsylvania, Cold Harbor, Petersburg, and so on.   I remember looking out the window as we crossed the Rappahannock River.  The highway went from maybe six lanes to at least a dozen as we approached the Beltway encircling the District of Columbia.  In the middle was a lane that can be used for traffic going in either direction, which can be changed depending on the time of day.  We crossed the Potomac and got our first look at Washington.

I have driven a car in Puerto Rico, so almost no amount of traffic or dangerous road conditions can upset me too much anymore.  That said, Washington is a frustrating place to drive, if only because unpredictable road closures render almost any system of navigation, old-fashioned or electronic, useless.  Miriam is fond of using the GPS device on her phone.  In many places that gadget would suffice.  In Washington, however, it will say, “Turn right at Pennsylvania Avenue”, unaware that attempting to turn right at Pennsylvania Avenue would result in a significant Department of Homeland Security incident.  We had a hotel reservation and a car.  But we didn’t want to valet to park our car at the hotel because that would be absurdly expensive.  Finding a reasonably-priced garage near our hotel was challenging.  Meanwhile, Miriam was nervous that the hotel would demand a substantial deposit above and beyond the price of the room, which was already paid.  In Puerto Rico last year, the resort there demanded many hundreds of dollars as a deposit, which significantly depleted our walkin’ around money.  The price of our room in San Juan, however, was a bargain compared to the price of our room in Washington.  If we had to pay a thousand dollars as a deposit in D.C., our time there would be significantly less lavish.  I could not imagine how they would expect guests to front so much money, so I was not nearly as worried as Miriam.  And, thankfully for both of us, no unreasonable deposit was required.

The Willard Hotel is historic.  There is no disputing that fact.  Every important political figure of the past two centuries has either stayed there or visited.  The original building has been replaced by a far more grandiose one, which would look quite at home in Paris, but the new building has a legacy almost as rich.  The lobby is opulent, with the seals of the fifty states painted on the coffered ceiling.  Behind the reception desk are old fashioned slots for room keys.  The Pennsylvania Avenue side of the hotel is one floor lower than the F Street side: to get up to F Street you pass through a long corridor and up some steps, where there is a second small, but still fancy lobby.  Our room, No. 914, was on a high floor facing east.  You can see our room’s window, surrounded by fluted stonework, directly above the very center of this photograph.  When we first got to our room a tuxedo-clad man was exiting, having just left a basket of fruit on a table by the window.  The radio was on, and I took it as a good sign that Schumann’s Konzertstück for For Horns was playing.  The furnishings were elegant, and the bed was comfortable.  The bathroom appeared to be made entirely of marble.

We didn’t stay in the room long.  In fact, we put our bags down and almost immediately took off for the Mall.  On our previous trip to Washington, the National Museum of American History was closed.  We were so disappointed to miss it then, and our return trip was prompted, in large part, by our desire to see the treasures that great museum holds.  We walked briskly down 14th Street and entered the building along Constitution Avenue.  Inside the lobby, long glass display cases hold assorted neat things: fancy jars for leeches, pretty kitty dresses, C-3POs, shirts for Magnum, P.I.s, and so on.  The Smithsonian exhibits are arranged by subject, with a “featured artifact” displayed prominently.  At the transportation exhibit, for example, a historic locomotive sits on rails.  In that area they had an old car from the Chicago L, a D.C. streetcar, old automobiles, a ship’s engine, and several locomotives, including one spectacular early-twentieth century engine with wheels as tall as me.  The first ladies’ gowns were extremely popular, and people pressed their faces against the glass to get a look.  Everyone who passed it stopped and stared at Mrs. Obama’s dress.  Another star attraction at the Smithsonian is Julia Child’s kitchen.  We spent so much time looking at every little thing that the museum closed and we had to leave.  We weren’t willing to rush it and miss things, so we decided we’d come back the next day.

We still had hours of daylight, and I thought we might check out the view from the tower at the Old Post Office, but, alas, it was closed.  So we took a leisurely walk back to the hotel to get ready for our night out.  We were looking sharp.

I had made us reservations at the Old Ebbitt Grill on 15th Street, just a half block from our hotel.  It’s an old place, and remarkably popular.  The bar is legendary.  It had a great atmosphere, and, to my great relief, Mrs. Hill was very pleased with the menu.  She loved her meal; I loved mine.  The service was impeccable.  The prices were not obscene.  Sure, it was more than we usually spend on a meal, but it was special.  They had a painting hanging on the wall there that I loved, and were it not larger than me, I’d have been tempted to snatch it off the wall and abscond with it.   All together, the dinner was an experience we won’t forget.

Though it was after ten o’clock, we weren’t ready to turn in just yet, so we took the short walk around the White House grounds.  The skies were cloudy, but the temperature was comfortable, and the walk back to our hotel was pleasant.  The lobby was quiet at that hour, and we took the time to explore more of the hotel before heading up to our room.  Once there, we found little chocolates on our bed, and the covers had been turned down.

The last weekend of May this year marked our fifth wedding anniversary, and with no scholastic obligations weighing me down, and with the car in good working order, we set out on a long road trip that would take us across much of the southeast United States, with the nation’s capital as our main attraction, and many other places of interest along the way.

Day One

We pulled out of the driveway before dawn on Thursday, May 27.  After stopping for some last-minute items, we got underway in earnest, and were making our way north out of Gainesville when the sun was coming up.  Perhaps because I have driven the route so many times, and perhaps because of the unremitting bleakness of the towns along the way (Waldo, Starke, Lawtey), Highway 301 south of Interstate 10 struck me as about the least visually rewarding stretch of road on our entire trip.  Only Interstate 95 through South Carolina rivaled it for sheer blight.

We had already reached Georgia by 7:30AM.  In fact, I missed getting a free map at the state welcome center because it was not yet open.  We crossed the Savannah River and were in South Carolina barely an hour later.  We drove on for another hour and twenty minutes before stopping for breakfast.  Interstate 95 spans an enormous distance across South Carolina, and the drive through that state seems to go on forever, with almost nothing beautiful to look at.  Miriam drove that leg of the trip, and we got to North Carolina around 12:30PM.  That time I got my free map.  I had never been further north on I-95 than the junction at I-40, but, truth be told, there isn’t much to look at:  the fake lighthouse in Kenly houses a Wendy’s.  We were in Virginia just before three o’clock, and as we speeded toward our destination, I became excited by the highway signs: we had traveled a long way!

Richmond was our destination that first day.  We arrived at our hotel around 4:30PM, checked in, and almost immediately headed back out.  We had to choose between two activities in the city that night: enjoying food and entertainment at the botanical garden, or visiting the Edgar Allen Poe Museum.  I am glad we chose the latter, because the Poe Museum in Richmond is a little gem.  Housed in the city’s oldest building (sadly, none of Poe’s former residences in Richmond still stand), the museum holds a surprising number of authentic items, including objects once owned by the writer, as well as autograph manuscripts, and extremely rare editions of his works.  Spread among a few modest old brick buildings, the museum even houses the staircase from Poe’s childhood home, fully reassembled.  Stepping outside into a lovely courtyard, we sat and listened to a singer while enjoying a snack.  The weather was perfect, though Richmonders repeatedly apologized to us for what they considered uncommonly hot temperatures.  Miriam bought a souvenir in the gift shop, and we said goodbye to the friendly staff, having experienced a splendid little place that cost nothing that night.  Plus, we parked directly in front of the front door!

A large model of nineteenth century Richmond at the Poe Museum drew my attention to the great state house that lies in the middle of that city.  It wasn’t far away, at all, and when we arrived we found it was unbelievably easy to park our car.  We climbed the steps at the southwest corner of the capitol grounds and found the place completely deserted.  It was still quite light outside, but nobody was around, so we decided to go exploring.  We walked right up to the great columns on the south portico of the building, and peeked in the enormous windows.  I don’t recall trying to open the door, but it wouldn’t have surprised me if we could have just strolled right in.  The view of the city from that high place was delightful.  We walked around to the east side of the grounds and found the old governor’s mansion.  Several presidents of the United States have lived there.  It sits so close to the state house that I envied the office holder’s one-minute commute.  The mansion itself is handsome but not ostentatious.  It has a low wall in front that one could easily jump over.  Looking to the west across the north face of the capitol we saw the tall statue of Washington upon a horse.  It was beginning to get dark, but we continued to explore the grounds.  Great trees hovered over statues of famous Virginians; attractive benches surrounded lovely fountains; and gorgeous roses mocked me.

We wrung the last bit of daylight from the sky before leaving that place.  We went looking for a place to eat, but driving up and down the city streets yielded few obvious choices.  We were just looking in the wrong place.  According to our friends and Richmond natives, Kat and Harris, the area around the capitol clears out at night, while the nightlife moves to the west end.  There, along a very busy Main Street, we found the Star-lite.  It was intimate enough, though I was somewhat sad when they switched the television above the bar from the Nationals game to basketball.  I apparently had a milkshake for dinner.  On the way back to our hotel we drove down long avenues of elegant nineteenth century homes.  The entire city, it seems, was rebuilt in the 1870s, a hundred years before I was born.

May first was also my graduation day.  My mother, my father, and all my living grandparents came to Gainesville and stood outside the O’Connell Center in the blazing sun for what seemed like an eternity waiting for the previous commencement ceremony to conclude.  When I was at last allowed to enter the building, sweaty and thirsty, I located my fellow English majors, and stood silently in line waiting to be ushered into the arena.  I didn’t know or even recognize anyone until the ceremony was under way, and even then, of the hundreds of names called that afternoon I recognized only two besides my own.  I had pleasant conversation with the girl sitting next to me.  She, too, was an English major, but her focus was literary theory, and mine was eighteenth- and nineteenth century British literature: our paths never crossed.  I was genuinely proud and happy to be there, and I thought the ceremony itself was dignified. Miriam captured a funny picture of me looking like Sasquatch as I crossed the stage.

After it concluded I gathered my people, and we made our way in several cars to Satchel’s.  I was frustrated by the experience, not because the restaurant was so crowded and the wait was so long; I expected that.  Rather, I was disappointed that Satchel’s made no attempt to reduce the suffering of their waiting patrons.  I knew I wanted one of the rare and desirable deep-dish pizzas–I had even reserved one ahead of time–but they wouldn’t start preparing it until we were seated, even though doing so would have freed a table forty minutes earlier for other patrons.  The lack of any real climate controlled waiting area was hard on my older relatives.  But the food was delicious, and everyone loved it.  Plus, Miriam brought a cake.

That day also marked the first time my mother and grandmother ever saw where I live.  I am sure they loved our home.  Miriam and I set our air conditioning down to seventy-six degrees to make sure everyone was comfortable, and it felt so comfortable that we decided then and there that we’d keep it that way all summer long.  I dubbed this “Summer of Seventy-Six”.

I received some nice graduation gifts: Miriam bought me new sneakers, my Grandma gave me a picture of her with my grandfather taken in the 1940s, and my Grandmom gave me a classy engraved pen.

That’s how summer began.  Just last week I received my diploma in the mail, so it’s official.  And now summer is ending.

One day in early summer 1998, Jeff came home from being out all day and told us about a song he had heard that day.  “I always immediately turn off a song when I hear ridiculous harmony guitars, but today I decided to listen”.  “What was it”, Steve asked.  “The Boys Are Back in Town”.

“The Boys Are Back in Town” is, strictly speaking, a spring song, since the speaker declares that “it won’t be long till summer comes, now that the boys are here again”.  But whenever I hear it now, because of Jeff, I think back on that early summer of 1998, and the ridiculous harmony guitars make me smile.

Today, the Willard Hotel becomes even more historic:  Mrs. Dana John Hill and I are spending our fifth wedding anniversary here.

Our room is splendid.

This jersey, which Miriam sometimes wears, is in the Dana Heritage Project Catalog of Significant Objects.