Month: November 2018

By Jim.

One question we get asked is how we plan our trip.  My answer is that it’s like jazz – there’s a basic structure (long-term planning of a general route and for holidays and special occasions), but we can improvise details (add a stop or visit particular sights) on short notice.

Case in point – the past two weeks.

When we left Washington DC, we were headed to the Smoky Mountains in Tennessee for some hiking and to find out if Gatlinburg is as kitschy as it’s reputed to be.  My Crimson Tide gear was washed and ready to wear, which is always an enjoyable fashion statement among forlorn Vols.

I also had some earplugs handy in case somebody forgot the scores of the last 12 Alabama-Tennessee games and played Rocky Top Tennessee.  Fun fact:  In 1972, the authors of Rocky Top, Boudleaux and Felice Bryant, granted the school a blanket license to perform the song as often as it wants to.  The first time the UT marching band played its now-continuously-looped version of the damn song was at the 1972 Alabama-Tennessee game.  So inspired were the Vols that day that they lost, 17-10, and have only beaten Alabama 14 times in the ensuing 47 years.  I still wish they’d shut it up.

On our Sunday drive down Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley, we took a mid-afternoon break by stopping at the Natural Bridge.  It’s a 215-foot high arch made of limestone and with a pastoral creek and trail leading to a little waterfall.

Also along the trail is a recreated settlement of the Monacan Native American tribe, which considered the land to be sacred ground.

The arch and adjoining 157 acres of land were once owned by Thomas Jefferson, who purchased them for 20 shillings from King George III in 1774.  During his presidency, Jefferson built a cabin on the property and used it as a retreat.  It’s now a Virginia state park.

We then continued through southern Virginia and stopped for the night just south of Bristol, which straddles the Virginia-Tennessee border.  As we ate our first dinner of Southern barbecue on the trip, we checked the upcoming weather forecast for Gatlinburg and the Smokies.  It called for high winds and possible tornadoes.  Goodbye, Gatlinburg; see you again in January, Tennessee.

We made a new plan.  After a quick drive into West Virginia just to say we’d been there,

we headed east to Asheville, NC.  We arrived at our hastily-booked campground just in time to hunker down and watch the midterm election returns.  When we awoke Wednesday morning (feeling better about the future than we have in a while), a strong odor was permeating the air.  I hoped it wasn’t what I was afraid it was, but I knew better, because that smell is unforgettable – we were near a paper mill.  A quick Google search confirmed it.

That turned into our second itinerary change in as many days.  We’d already planned to visit Lake Norman, NC, near Charlotte, after our time in the Smokies, so we moved that leg of the trip up in our queue and got ourselves into a great little RV park on a finger of the lake.

As we drove to Lake Norman, we heard the news that Trump had fired Sessions and appointed Matthew Whitaker as acting Attorney General.  That motivated us to drive to Charlotte that afternoon and participate in a rally protesting Whitaker’s appointment and the resulting risk to the Mueller investigation.  

Friday night, Aunt Ginny and I visited her niece Audrey, her husband Kyle Collins and their adorable eight-week-old son, Nicholas, who live in the Charlotte suburb of Huntersville.    

The visit conjured up the same feelings we had when visiting the young O’Haras last month – enjoying the excitement of a young family building their lives together, with a bright future to look forward to.

Saturday was a special day.  Ginny toured me around the area where she grew up before moving to Westport.  She showed me Shelby, NC, where she was born, lived and went to grade school, plus the Lake Norman Yacht Club, where she spent happy summers sailing and being a kid.  I know those are good memories, because she glowed as she told stories and rediscovered places from her past.   

When Ginny learned that an old friend of her dad’s, Tom Guy, still lives next door to the Yacht Club, we walked over to his house.  Tom welcomed us in for a visit.  In addition to being a former Commodore of the Yacht Club (as was Ginny’s dad, Roger Dysart), Tom was a hot World War II fighter pilot – he told us his story of nearly getting shot down by Japanese fighters and surviving a crash-landing back onto his aircraft carrier. 

We then drove from Lake Norman to Durham.

My cousin, Libba Adams, lives in Pittsboro, a few miles outside the Durham/Chapel Hill area. Libba and I reminisced about playing on the beach in Panama City, attending a long-ago family reunion in Georgia and – most of all – we swapped stories about the splendid Sallie Horton Lay, who was her aunt and my grandmother, and who was one of the most compelling influences in our lives.  

The next day brought another special family re-connection.  My uncle (my dad’s only brother), Lee Noel, is a Duke lifer.  He went to college there, had a second career as a key administrator at the Fuqua School of Business and now lives in Durham in his golden years.  At age 88, Lee still has a presence about him that I call benevolent forcefulness.  He exudes warmth, intelligence and dignity.  We had a happy and nostalgic lunch, then he gave us a driving tour of Durham and the Duke campus, capped off by visiting my Aunt Sue at the facility where she and Lee live.  The visit made me one happy nephew.  And Lee met Ginny for the first time and said she’s a “peach” (he’s always been an excellent judge of character)!

After months of good luck with weather, we’ve been slogging through a lot of rain lately.  We’d planned to leave Durham Tuesday morning, but stayed put an extra day to avoid sharing the road with Noah’s Ark.

Tuesday night, we had dinner with my old NFL friend, Jim Steeg, and his wife Jill Lieber.  You think I’m a sports fan – Jim and Jill got married at Fenway Park!

Wednesday, we set off for Kitty Hawk, on the Outer Banks of the North Carolina coast.  About a half-hour out of Durham, our phones starting clanging with weather alerts for where we were heading – heavy rains, gale-force winds and flood warnings (this year, the coastline has had nearly 300% of its average annual rainfall, leaving the ground ripe for bad things to happen).  We stopped, ate lunch, did some research, consulted our weather crystal ball and decided it wasn’t worth the risk to keep going.  Instead of swimming up to Kitty Hawk, we drove down to Myrtle Beach, SC.  We’ll be here until Sunday, when we head to Charleston to visit Coley for Thanksgiving.  We hope it warms up enough by Saturday for us to play golf.

And if it doesn’t, we’ll figure out another improv!

By the way, there’s important update to make to the report on our Washington, DC trip.

One of Gwen’s best friends from Weston is a budding rock-star journalist, and we got to share her company one night in DC.  Jess Bidgood has spent the past few years as a reporter for the New York Times.  She recently moved to Washington to become the national political reporter for the Boston Globe.  When we had dinner with her and her boyfriend Kyle, I didn’t know whether to hug her or ask her for an autograph.

Sorry for the delay in posting this, Jess & Kyle!

Update by Jim.

Ginny posted the paragraph below as a reply to a Facebook comment written about my original post.  Her heartfelt comments express what our emotions were during our time in Washington, and continue to be in response to the divisive words and deeds since the midterms by our “leader.”

***

By Ginny.

What Jim didn’t write about was the emotional experience of this stretch. So much history right there for us to sink ourselves into – just days before the midterms. There were times we just looked at each other with tears in our eyes and asked “haven’t we learned?” From slavery, civil wars, senseless wars, assassinations, loss of lives – determination of a few that grew to many to make us a free people – to make ALL of us free – with equal rights, protections and respect. Then to think about where we are today, with our leader who divides and lies. We wonder if he has ever done the tour of museums and monuments that we just did that are just steps from his “home”. We’re guessing not. We had a lot of speechless moments….. and tears.

***

By Jim.

There have been either three or nine capital cities of the United States.

If the counting starts as of the Declaration of Independence in 1776, Philadelphia was the first capital, followed by Baltimore, MD, Lancaster, PA (both when the British were threatening Philly), York, PA (where the Articles of Confederation were drafted, the first known legal document to refer to the “United States of America”), Princeton, NJ, Annapolis, MD, Trenton, NJ, New York, NY and Washington, DC.

But if the starting date is the ratification of the Constitution and the formation of the modern American republic in 1789, New York, Philadelphia and DC have been the only three capitals.  That’s probably the better benchmark, because the creation of the capital is mandated in the Constitution.  Article 1, Section 8 authorizes the establishment of a “District…as may, by cession of particular states, and the acceptance of Congress, become the seat of the government of the United States”.

In 1789, George Washington was sworn in as President in New York.  In 1790, Congress passed enabling legislation, the Residence Act, to create a national capital.  As part of the compromise locating the new capital in the South, Philadelphia was named the capital for 10 years, while the new city and its federal facilities were constructed.  The exact location, on the Potomac River, was selected by President George Washington (who was a former land surveyor).  The city was formed from 100 square miles of land donated by Maryland and Virginia.  In 1846, the Virginia portion of the city (modern-day Alexandria) was returned to the state.

Pierre Charles L’Enfant, a French-American engineer, designed the master plan for the city.  The placement of the Congress House on Jenkins Hill (now Capitol Hill), the President’s House, the “grand avenue” (now Pennsylvania Avenue) connecting those buildings and the National Mall were all part of the L’Enfant Plan of 1791.  What may have been the first political intrigue in Washington occurred in 1792 when two surveyors, Andrew and Benjamin Ellicott, made significant changes to the L’Enfant Plan after claiming L’Enfant had not provided them with an engraved copy of his plan.  By 1800, construction had proceeded to the point that Congress was able to convene in Washington and President John Adams could move into the not-yet-finished President’s House (which wasn’t officially called the White House until the Theodore Roosevelt Administration).
If you’ve never been to Washington DC, go (unless it’s July or August).  It’s majestic.  The Capitol, Washington Monument and Lincoln Memorial are aligned in a straight line along the Mall, accented by the Reflecting Pool.  The Mall and nearby Tidal Basin also are the sites of the World War II Memorial, the Vietnam Veterans Wall, the Korean War Memorial, the Jefferson Memorial, the FDR Memorial and the Martin Luther King Memorial, plus the White House is visible from the north side of the Mall.  Most of the Cabinet-level agencies are headquartered in the Federal Triangle between the Capitol and White House.  The Smithsonian, National Archives, National Gallery of Art and the spectacular new African-American History Museum are among the many museums in the same area.  There is a 12-story height limit on all buildings, preserving urban vistas and keeping the city bright and unaffected by skyscraper shadows.  Statues, fountains and parks are everywhere.  It will make you proud to be an American and it will teach you as much about your country as you want to absorb.

Before arriving in DC, we spent a weekend in Northern Virginia with old friends Tim Ruhe and Donna Quinn.

I got off to a slow start Saturday after staying up until 2:30 watching most (but not the end) of Game 3 of the World Series.  Still, we had a great time dodging the raindrops during our brewpub and winery explorations in the beautiful Virginia countryside.

While running errands near our RV park in Maryland on Sunday, I drove past a prep school that’s been in the news recently for the wrong reasons.  I didn’t see Squee, Bart or Donny.

Monday, we took a nostalgic trip (for me) to Annapolis to wake up my memories of visiting Pete when he was a Midshipman.  

Tuesday, in DC, it was all about the monuments!

Wednesday, we visited the Smithsonian National Museum of African-American History and Culture.  Man oh man, it is SOMETHING!

Efforts to build an African-American history museum started in 1915, when black Union army veterans first lobbied for a memorial to their service in the Civil War.  Glacially, various Presidents appointed various committees to study various proposals.  It wasn’t until 101 years after the initial efforts by those soldiers that this national museum opened its doors.  

Visitors spend an average of six hours in the museum, more than three times the length of an average stay at a Smithsonian museum.  That’s one reason why it’s the toughest museum ticket in town.

There’s a riveting introductory exhibit on the history of the slave trade, followed by presentations on slavery, the abolitionist movement, the Civil War, Reconstruction, the Jim Crow era, the awakenings of the Civil Rights movement, integration, black power, the mainstreaming of black culture, Black Lives Matter and more.  

 

For us, six hours weren’t enough.  We were uplifted and exhausted when we left.  While walking to our Metro station, we walked past another, more notorious modern “monument” smack dab on Pennsylvania Avenue  Michele Obama would have disapproved of me not going high.  

More museums for me on Thursday (Ginny stayed at the rig and worked) – the National Museum of American History (which, weirdly, is prominently sponsored by Kenneth Behring, the eccentric former owner of the Seahawks) and the National Archives.

There were some cool displays at the American History Museum, such as the original Lego patent.

Lamentably but understandably, photography is not allowed in the sanctity of the gallery in the National Archives where the original Declaration of Independence and U.S. Constitution are displayed, but it’s hard to look at those – the greatest and most important documents in the country, if not the world – without getting goosebumps.  Go see them for yourself.

Friday was a visit to another anticipated site, the Newseum.  It has lots of displays on lots of subjects, but we ended up being disappointed.  Much of what it shows is the same media coverage of historical events that we’ve already seen elsewhere.  Very little is devoted to journalists and media of industry/historical significance.  H.L. Mencken spent much of his career just up the road at the Baltimore Sun.  Nothing.  Bob Woodward became the greatest journalist of our time across town at the Washington Post.  Not much.  There’s great footage of Chet Huntley and Walter Cronkite, but nothing devoted to the rise, development and significance of anchormen.  One flat-out amazing item on display, however, is a portion of a radio antenna that used to be atop the North Tower of the World Trade Center…

…plus a tribute to the entire profession that has never been more important than now, during the President Fake News regime.  

By Saturday, after a week in Washington and Gettysburg before that, we were museumed-out.  We decided to have a kick-back, do-nothing day – the first one of those we’ve had in awhile.  Plus, I had to get taped up for Alabama-LSU that night.  It turned out to be a good day…and a good game.

Sunday, we headed to southern Virginia, en route to a planned stop in the Smoky Mountains in Tennessee.

By Jim.

We did a dogleg leaving Connecticut.

One of our goals on the trip is visiting all 14 of the Presidential Libraries administered by the National Archives & Park Service.  At the first library we visited, Eisenhower’s, I was given a Passport that, if stamped at all 14, gets me a nice piece of swag.  It also will be a cool scrapbook item one of these days (assuming I ever do a scrapbook).

Back in the day, I made an annual pilgrimage to Hyde Park on President’s Day.  I found the place irresistible – the home of the greatest President since Lincoln, who led his country out of the Great Depression and to victory in World War II, and whose presence is still felt at his majestic estate on the Hudson River.  But as many times as I’d been there, we had to go again to get that Passport stamp, so Hyde Park was our first stop after leaving Westport.  I expected us to go through the motions, after having seen the place so many times.  Pleasant surprise – there’s a new visitors center, a revised presentation of the museum exhibits AND a really cool new statue.

FDR’s most famous line (from his first inaugural address) was, “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.”   As relevant as that still is today, we saw another quote that also resonated: 

Then we shifted gears from history to family by visiting Ginny’s nephew, Connor O’Hara, and his wife Alley and their toddler Caiden in Wayne, NJ.  It gave us a warm feeling to see a young family happily building their lives.  They’re living in their first house, they have a wonderful child and another on the way, and they’re flourishing in their careers – they have so much to look forward to.

After that family interlude, we drove to one of the most history-steeped places in America, Gettysburg, PA.

Gettysburg is the site of the most famous battle of the Civil War.  Before it was fought, Confederate General Robert E. Lee and his Army of Northern Virginia won a series of battles in Virginia and Maryland.  Lee planned a daring invasion of Pennsylvania, starting in June, 1863.  His objectives were to seize munitions, crops and supplies to send to warn-torn Virginia and seize the nearby capital city of Harrisburg to put political pressure on the Union to seek a negotiated peace to the war.

The battle began on July 1, 1863.  Lee’s Confederates broke through Union lines and occupied the town.  Union forces retreated to defensive positions on the outskirts of town, which had the tactical advantage of being on high ground.  These positions were barely held by the Union (led by General George Meade, who had only been appointed by President Lincoln to this command the previous week) on July 2.  Confident of victory, Lee ordered a frontal assault on the middle of the Union lines on the following day, the deadly Pickett’s Charge, which was repelled by the Union (depicted here in an amazing cyclorama at the Visitors Centers).  

Lee’s men fell back, then retreated that night, escaping capture that might have ended the war right then and there.  Nevertheless, the Confederacy never recovered from the one-two punch of losing at both Gettysburg and Vicksburg, Mississippi on consecutive days (Vicksburg was Ulysses Grant’s first major victory, which gave the Union control of the Mississippi River).  The war continued for 22 more months, but the tide turned towards the Union after July, 1863.  Lee’s aura of invincibility was shattered at Gettysburg.

The casualties from the battle were staggering – more than 7,000 American soldiers (Union and Confederate) killed, nearly 11,000 more missing and more than 33,000 wounded.  It was left to the 2,400 people living in Gettysburg to deal with the carnage.

The Soldiers’ National Cemetery, now called the Gettysburg National Cemetery, was established as the burial ground for 3,512 Union troops.  It was consecrated on November 19, 1863, at a ceremony attended by 15,000.  The featured speaker was a famous orator, Edward Everett, who spoke for two hours, describing the battle and its strategic context.  After Everett’s speech came President Abraham Lincoln, who had been invited to the ceremony to deliver “a few appropriate remarks.”  Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, only 271 words long, is perhaps the most famous speech in American history.  Everett subsequently wrote President Lincoln a letter stating, “I should be glad if I could flatter myself that I came as near to the central idea of the occasion, in two hours, as you did in two minutes.”

Today, the battlefield sweeps around the town of Gettysburg.  The area immediately south of downtown is now a national military park.  There are over 1,300 monuments throughout the battlefield, placed by veterans groups and state legislatures in the places where their troops served.  

One hundred fifty-five years after the battle, the park and cemetery are somber places.   

The outcome of the Battle of Gettysburg and the restoration of the union after the defeat of the Confederacy are now taken for granted.  However, as we toured the battlefield (first on a tour bus and then by driving and hiking), we could see just how close the Confederacy came to victory.  A few minutes here and a few yards of ground there, and the outcome would have been different, with profound effects on the nation and the North American continent.  It’s sobering to realize how naive it is to take for granted our strength and stability, in these days when there is so much uncertainty about our liberties,  institutions and national character.

From southern Pennsylvania, we headed south to the Washington DC area to visit old friends and see some of the sights of our nation’s capital.  (Sorry, we’re a little behind schedule on our reports!)

By Jim.

Ginny’s heartfelt post on Connecticut will be hard to match.  We decided that our visit to Connecticut was so special, each of us should express our own feelings about it.

Despite wearing my Alabama heritage on my sleeve (especially during football season, as you may have noticed), I lived in Connecticut almost half my life – 32 years.  That’s more than twice as long as I lived in Alabama, and way longer than I lived in California, Oregon and Washington.

Connecticut defined my adult life.  I moved there right after law school, when I went to work for the NFL in New York City.  My children were born there and virtually all of my memories of being a father are based there.  Whether it was riding a commuter train from Darien to Manhattan or driving from Litchfield to Bristol (or, ill-advisedly, driving from Weston to Far Hills, NJ), it was my home during most of my career.  I grew to love fall foliage, the aroma and warmth of a crackling fire, the hushed beauty of the morning after an overnight snowfall, the warm days and cool evenings of summer, sunsets in the Litchfield Hills and the camaraderie of hockey parents as our kids skated around rinks all over the state.  I met Ginny in Connecticut (our first date was at the Inn At Newtown), and it’s where we launched the magical mystery tour of a life that we’ve been sharing for almost 11 years.

When we planned this year-long trek of ours, we knew we wanted to be in Connecticut in October and we knew we wanted and needed to be there for a good long while, to reconnect with so many people who were and still are special.

Our sentimental journey also included some steely-eyed practicality.  The Northeast is not, shall we say, particularly RV-friendly.  After futilely searching for a place to park The Big T anywhere near where we planned to stay, we booked a room at The Westport Inn and dropped the rig off at a nearby Freightliner dealer for some scheduled maintenance.  Practicality then morphed into good luck, when the hot water system on the rig started acting up and we found an authorized repair dealer just up the road from the Freightliner dealer to fix it.

Before getting to Westport, we spent the weekend in Old Saybrook at the weekend house of Mike and Lisa Foster, just a short walk from Long Island Sound.

Then it was on to our old home turf.  As Ginny has already described, the whole week was a blur – so many people to see, so many places to go.  We smiled so much, our cheeks got sore.

We went to NYC one evening, where Grand Central hasn’t lost its recently-restored grandeur,

visited Jay Moyer Bob Raskopf and Gary Gertzog, dear friends from my NFL days (with whom I had so much fun, I forgot to take pictures!) and had a belated birthday dinner with JJ.
We drove up to Litchfield one day to visit old haunts…

and enjoy a special lunch with old friends Bill and Betsy Goff.

We were beyond lucky to be in town the same weekend of a big party, where we got to visit with some old friends we might not otherwise have gotten to see.

Nostalgic visits aren’t the mere wallowing in memories – they are a chance to savor people and places that define our lives and give them special meaning.  THAT was our visit to Connecticut, a place like no other for both of us.

 

By Ginny.