Posts Tagged ‘National Park’

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Bloody Land


2012
06.22

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Pix: The Coach at Dead Horse Hill.
Yes, another damned battlefield.

Paper presented and university travel funds [1] running out, The Coach and I packed our bags and headed out of the old confederate capital. Our next destination: Hagerstown, MD, to stay with The Coach’s college roommate and his wife. Their house – complete with a swimming pool – was going to be our ‘staging ground’ for trips into DC and NYC.

Mapquest – that notorious liar – told us that it would only take three hours to get from Richmond to Hagerstown. Since our friends wouldn’t be home from work until 6, 6:30 p.m., at best, we had lots of time to kill. Originally, we were going to check out some of the Confederate sites in Richmond, but a quick look at the NPS.gov website persuaded us to stop at the Fredericksburg & Spotsylvania National Military Park. This site, located halfway between the two capital cities, was billed as the bloodiest land in the United States:

Fredericksburg, Chancellorsville, Wilderness, and Spotsylvania–this is America’s battleground, where the Civil War roared to its bloody climax. No place more vividly reflects the War’s tragic cost in all its forms. A town bombarded and looted. Farms large and small ruined. Refugees by the thousands forced into the countryside. More than 85,000 men wounded; 15,000 killed–most in graves unknown.

Now, when I said “persuaded us” I really mean “persuaded me to be nice to The Coach and let him go to a battlefield or two.” I thought that we’d go see the movie at Fredericksburg, poke around the battlefield, then go see the movie at Chancellorsville and poke around that battlefield, then leave. Three hours at the max, you know.

Sadly, that was not the case.

We got to Fredericksburg and watched the film. That was okay. Then The Coach abandoned me (yet again) while he took a tour of the most important part of any visitor’s center: the john. Eventually, we made it outside where we walked along the Sunken Road and saw a house that had been shot up during the war. We yacked a little about how you never, ever give up the high ground – and how stupid it was to keep sending soldiers into an unwinnable battle. We also took a 45 minute drive around this battlefield, using the park map as a guide.

That doesn’t sound too, too bad, right?

It wasn’t until after we watched the film at the Chancellorsville visitor’s center that my three hour “in and out” plan hit the skids. Now, we already knew that we didn’t have enough time to see all four battlefields and I had already given up hope of seeing the grave of Stonewall Jackson’s amputated arm. But then we picked up the audio tour CD’s for two of the battlefields. I had thought that each one would be about an hour long (like the ones we had used in the past at other battlefields). Yeah, no. Each of the audio tours is at least three hours long. If you want to see the whole park, you’re going to need a couple of days.

What do you geek?
Not a three hour car tour through a battlefield
Self photo taken while abandoned in a battlefield museum

I guess I have a grown up version of ADHD because sitting in a car for three hours, driving around and looking at signs is just not my idea of a good time. Honestly, I believe that battlefields are better seen from bicycles and by foot – not by sitting on your hind end in a car. Plus, the Mustang’s passenger seat is not designed for people with short legs; after about two hours, my legs fall asleep and I need to get out for a walk [2].

As for the roads in Chancellorsville? Yeah, some of those back roads were just not suited to my Mustang’s low profile. The Coach drove my car through a creek that crossed a road. If that wasn’t bad enough, he also took my car off-roading down a gravel road full of potholes. So, when they call this “America’s Battleground,” they weren’t kidding: The Coach got an earful about how the Mustang needed survive the trip (as well as the next four years).

Ah, the art of marital compromise, crushed by battlefields and a Friday night rush hour around D.C.

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Birthplace


2012
06.21

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Archaeological Dig at Jamestown
Colonial National Historical Park

June 7, 2012: Richmond to the Historic Triangle

I have issues, my friends. Lots and lots of issues, including the fact that every time I go to a conference I am either sick or getting sick. This trip to Richmond was no different: I ended up hacking, coughing and sneezing my way through a panel on women’s history. Seriously, no matter how much water I drank or how many cough drops I sucked, I could not keep quiet. I was like the back row cougher at the symphony – I was the person that everyone wants to leave, but the usher doesn’t have enough guts to kick out. Finally, though, the cold won out: I had to leave the room and now I will never know the answer to the question of whether Nixon was a feminist, albeit an unwilling one.

Let’s just say that the Cold from Hell took its time retuning to the fiery pits from whence it came.

After resting up a bit, I persuaded The Coach to take me on a road trip to the Colonial National Historical Park – a place where, according to the NPA website, one can “witness American’s Beginnings, from an English colony in 1607 to an independent nation in 1781.” The park is actually located in an archipelago of historical sites: there’s Colonial Williamsburg, Jamestown Settlement & the Yorktown Victory Center … and then there’s the National Park which includes the Yorktown Battlefield, the Jamestowne site, and the Colonial Parkway which connects them.

I filled my pocket with cough drops, The Coach called for the car [1], and we set out on our afternoon adventure. Since we had something like a 60 minute drive, we popped in the last disc of our library audiobook [2] and pretty much snickered from Richmond to the world’s worst Sonic, located near Williamsburg.

Fortune shined on us, and we made it to the Jamestown site in time to take the archaeological tour of the Jamestowne fort site (I know, I know: to ‘e’ or not to ‘e,’ that is the question here, isn’t it?). We walked down the boardwalk over the marshy area and sat near one of the anniversary monuments that informed us that Jamestown was the birthplace of Virginia and of the United States. Our fearless leader – a person from Historic Jamestowne, not from the NPS – arrived shortly after we did. He told the crowd that we would soon be wilting in the sun; well, sure, you know, Virginia, summer. But honestly, it was a short walk because the site is small, so I guess some people are just wimps or something [3]. The tour was actually pretty cool if you’re a history teacher; last year, researchers had found the church where John Rolfe and Pocahontas were married. We learned that for many years the site of the fort was lost (but now, it was obviously found) and that an Army Corps seawall actually kept the fort’s site from eroding away. We also saw the markers from dead colonists, but that’s just creepy.

One Wet Fort
Jamestown, Virginia

The Coach wanted to see the Yorktown Battlefield, so we headed on down the Colonial Parkway after the talk was finished. Along the way, The Coach saw some kind of boat out in the York River, so he stopped the car and took a picture. {Yeah, we are so damned exciting, aren’t we?} We finally got to Yorktown where we watched a film, learned that The Coach was shorter than George Washington, and drove around this Revolutionary War battlefield. That’s right: Revolutionary, not Civil War! Eventually, we ended up out at the Yorktown Surrender Field where we were dive-bombed by the birds who were nesting in the concrete rafters of the visitor’s pavilion. Seriously, it was like a scene from an Alfred Hitchcock movie!

Maybe they weren’t so scary after all
Birds at the Yorktown Surrender Field

Okay, they might not look very scary, sitting up there in the nest, but those little stinkers were dive bombing everyone who walked up to the pavilion. I have to give them credit; the birds had more guts than Cornwallis did. Yeah, I had forgotten my history lessons from high school: ol’ Cornwallis faked an illness so he didn’t have to be present at the surrender. Anyhow, this was more than enough history for the day, plus The Coach deserved to be punished for snarking at me for buying him this shirt as an early birthday present. So, back to the hotel we went, to eat room service hamburgers and watch trash on TV.

Surrender of Lord Cornwallis
In the Capitol Rotunda

The Surrender Field Today
Yorktown National Battlefield

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Retrospective: Roman Orgy


2010
07.22

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Bathhouse Row
Hot Springs National Park, Arkansas

Yesterday, I swear, The Coach and I visited the nation’s weirdest national park. Okay, I haven’t been to every national park, so maybe that statement won’t be particularly accurate in the long run, but Hot Springs National Park is one of the oddest parks I have been to so far in my life. In some ways, it reminded me of TQE’s adventures in Turkey, only The Coach didn’t make it to the bathhouse before it closed.

Maybe I should start from the beginning? You see, when I first planned The Coach’s birthday trip, we were going to stop at the Superman Museum in Illinois. Of course, I planned that side trip before we acquired Patton — you know, before we ended up with the two critter tag-a-longs. Since we are good pet owners, we don’t leave our animals in steaming hot cars in the summer (if you do – shame on you!), so we ended up having an extra day in our trip to Little Rock. The Coach, seeing that Hot Springs was only an hour from Little Rock, decided that now would be a good time to ‘bag’ another stamp in our National Parks Passport Book. So, we grabbed the camera, put down Sally’s roof, and cruised down I-30 to the back road into the park. Along the way, we passed many signs indicating that Arkansas is overly concerned with religion {“Vote Out Incumbents! Support Pro-Life Candidates!”} but otherwise it was a pleasant drive.

We arrived in Hot Springs, drove down Central Avenue, tried not to run over pedestrians, and found one of the fanciest parking structures I’ve ever seen — including a nifty water feature:

The fanciest parking garage I have ever seen
Hot Springs, Arkansas

So, with the car stowed away, we wandered down to the Visitor’s Center, located in the old Fordyce Bathhouse. That’s when the weird park sensations began. You see, the hot springs were thought to have curative powers so people would travel by stagecoach and, later train then car, to come to the springs. The master vision was to have an European-style spa community — and this was the vision embraced by the park service prior to the Depression and World War II. As you might imagine, sick people don’t want to soak in springs. Oh no, they want creature comforts — thus, the bathhouses were built.

We toured the Fordyce, looking at the old tubs, the vapor closets, and the massage rooms. At one point, people were given electric shocks while in the water. Obviously this was before the Loony Tunes educated a generation of children, showing us that it was a bad idea to drop a toaster in a tub. Of course, the men had a larger bath room; they also had the better rooftop patio where they could sunbathe in the nude. But, my particular favorite moment in the center was the video — circa 1980s, judging by the hair — which told us how to take a bath. You go to a room and strip. An attendant wraps you in a sheet. You soak in a tub. Someone walks in and scrubs you with a loofah and so on and so forth. I was good until the loofah part; well, that part and the part where they talked about how they scrubbed the tubs out after each person. That skeeved me out a bit. All I could think about was getting athlete’s foot on my ass. The Coach? Not so skeeved out. While he was all for going down to the Buckstaff Baths, I think I’ll wait for the Quapaw Baths to open. I’d rather play in the pools, thank you very much.

After looking through the visitor’s center, The Coach asked one of the rangers to recommend a good place to eat. We ended up going to the Exchange Street Cafe, which was charming in its own way. The service sucked, the floors were sticky, and The Coach never got his fries, but the BBQ was good, the decor was cute, and I had some rockin’ good sweet potato fries. To be fair, I think that the waitress didn’t show up, which would explain the service. The poor lady at the counter was busing tables, serving food, and watching her kid all at the same time.

The rest of our trip included filling a bottle with hot springs water so that The Coach can “quaff the elixir,” as the orientation film put it. We also spent an ungodly amount of money to ride in a “duck,” which was an okay experience — but not worth $13/person. Plus, we then saw a different duck group giving the rides for only $10/person, which really kind of annoyed me, but whatever.

For the record: We did make it back to Little Rock in time for The Coach to go to the Arkansas Inland Maritime Museum. He said that it was a squeeze to get through the USS Razorback. Me? I stayed in the hotel room and played with our neglected cats.

Originally Published: July 7, 2008