I Drove 12 Hours To Visit Baron Von Steuben, The Queen of Afternoon Tea's Favorite Shop, and I Guess My College Student

You know, since I'm in the neighborhood!

Also, it was actually 13 hours with traffic, but that's fine because it gave me plenty of time to get acquainted with my newest Special Interest:

Omg Grant is struggling so hard with his alcoholism! I feel awful for him, and also increasingly exasperated every time he goes on another drinking binge. But he's so sad and lonely! He had to transfer stations to California, and apparently the most reasonable way there was to get on a ship and sail all the way around the entirety of South America, so he told his wife, Julia, that she shouldn't bring their toddler and her massively pregnant self along on the voyage. It was definitely the right call, because all the soldiers' children who did travel with them died, but still, it was months upon months before he even knew if she and their baby had survived childbirth, much less what the baby's name was, and that baby was two years old before he saw him for the first time. And meanwhile, Grant was completely unable to cope with how much he missed them and got so continually drunk that he had to resign from the Army, and then he was too broke to get home because he just keeps on falling for conmen. 

Also, Julia's family are slave owners, which is obviously a huge issue. And they HAAAAATE Grant! Grant's family also hates Julia, and to be honest it's a little bit funny but I'm sure it sucked so bad to live through. Grant's dad sucks, too.

ANYWAY, Grant and Julia will at some point in their future live reasonably close to the hotel I finally poured my creaky self into after 13 hours on the road:

Speaking of creaky...

You know who else didn't have a safe elevator?

THIS GUY!!!

So, yeah. I drove 12 hours (13 with traffic!) to visit my beloved child for a couple of days, but by "visit," I generally tend to mean that I want us to do a bunch of sightseeing at tourist destinations that I have chosen in advance, and we will yap constantly at each other and catch up on all our gossip, etc., while we do this sightseeing, with interruptions in the conversation only for the purpose of taking one million photos of the sights I brought us to see.

We therefore yapped our heads off while I admired and photographed the Grand Parade in its autumn splendor--

--and then we yapped our heads off while we got afternoon tea at the very first tea shop to ever earn a full 5 out of 5 stars in the Queen of Afternoon Tea's series, "The Good, the Bad, the Ugly, and the Yummy":

We agreed that those 5 stars were very well earned, although the prices have gone up since the Queen of Afternoon Tea visited:

Nevertheless, we thought our afternoon tea was well worth the price. Everything was lovely and comfy and relaxed (these are important criteria since our afternoon tea at the Wolseley in London, which was lovely but we have come to realize was NOT comfy and relaxed), our tea was delicious--

--the food was beautiful and also delicious--

Coronation chicken and 35th anniversary blend tea!

--and there was so much of it that I was still finishing up the last of the desserts two nights later, in one of the most delightful evenings spent alone that I can remember. Imagine a hotel room all to oneself, a VERY good book on one's nook (second book in a very good series, with the third book ready to go right after!), hockey on the TV, and the last few bits and bobs of this to munch on:

In short, it was just really nice to sit for an hour eating and drinking and people watching and discussing everyone we had each interacted with in the past 6 weeks and everything they had said and what we had thought about it and what books we'd read and how much we like Jack Wolfe's singing and when we thought we'd see him again and what show he might be doing at that time. 

The whole precious two days that I got to spend with my kid went just like that, yapping and shopping (she never brings enough clothes to school, even though I tell her every semester to bring more clothes!) and meandering around campus--

--poking around various interesting spots, like this autumnal photo setting that was just randomly hanging out in the sunken garden--

--or the obligatory old cemetery that MUST exist on every college campus--

--snooping around for interesting books in the library--

--eating SO much cafeteria food that I did not have to prepare for myself--

--and discussing the symptoms of alcohol poisoning just as some poor soul was loudly vomiting in the bathroom down the hall:

My favorite campus spot is the dye garden:

Cotinus coggygria makes yellow!

Flax also makes yellow.

The woad had gone to seed, so I grabbed a plastic sandwich baggie out of my backpack (one must ALWAYS travel with ample sandwich baggies--one never knows what one might want to contain!) and collected some seeds. I will be VERY excited if I manage to cultivate my very own woad plants from seed next year.

One of the dorms used to be an ancient office building, with these lovely interior doors with multi-paneled glass that let in tons of glorious light. But it turns out that dorm rooms don't actually work with giant windows in their doors, so every year the residents get to paint their windows however they like:

Residents tend to preserve the best ones, so some of these paintings have been up for a very long time!

All the halls have themes, and all the themes are unhinged. This hall's theme is Viral Internet Animals:

One of the nights that I was visiting, the dining halls hosted a Halloween party for their student employees, and the kid let me be her plus-one. She fetched me apple cider doughnuts and hot apple cider, and let me paint over the lines that she drew and even do a little bit of carefully-managed coloring in (ahem):

The most important steps were left to her artistic expertise, of course, because otherwise--

--our little Pottsfield resident wouldn't look so cute!

The kid kept her pumpkin to decorate her dorm room, and I left her to get ready for a Mean Girls movie night with her buddies ("On October 3rd, he asked me what day it was. 'It's October 3rd'") while I crashed back in my hotel room, because I needed my sleep for the next day's travels: New Jersey! Thomas Edison! Leaf peeping!!!

The worst thing about hotel rooms is how I'm always pretty sure I'm going to be axe murdered, but don't worry, because this elaborately constructed tangle of clothes hangers is actually not fragile and about to fall apart if touched but instead the key to my feeling of safety:

The BEST thing about hotels rooms is hockey on the TV!

Notice the leftover pastries from our afternoon tea. Not pictured: me in my pajamas, awesome book on my nook, Diet Sprite liberated from the dining hall Halloween party.

Next stop: New Jersey!

P.S. Want to follow along with my craft projects, books I'm reading, road trips to weird old cemeteries, looming mid-life crisis, and other various adventures on the daily? Find me on my Craft Knife Facebook page!