How cute is this parking lot bunny? One the one hand, I felt like I should scare it so that it didn't think that it was okay to just sit there in a parking lot, but on the other hand... look at its sweet little ears!!!!!!!
For the rest of the day, whenever I had to stop for gas or at another national park site, I proceeded to blow up the family group chat with yet more Roger Williams factoids.
Did you know that although he immigrated as a Puritan, he wasn't a religious extremist like most of the other Puritans? He believed in the separation of religious and civic matters, and that religious wrongs shouldn't be punished by civic action.
He named one of his children Freeborn!
He lived in Plymouth Colony for a while and even preached there, but he got pissed at them because they'd settled on Native American land without permission and also refused to pay the Native Americans any recompense for taking their land, so he left.
He wouldn't shut up about civil rights and fair treatment of Native Americans, though, so eventually the entire Massachusetts Bay Colony exiled him, and he escaped the sheriff by fleeing on foot during a blizzard! The Wampanoags hid him in their own settlements until Spring.
Later that year, he acquired property by properly negotiating with and compensating the native peoples who it belonged to, and he founded Providence Plantations as the first European settlement on the continent in which church and state were strictly separated, and government was by majority rule.
It was said by all that he and the native peoples of the surrounding lands respected each other and negotiated together when they wanted different things, and he also learned a bunch of their languages.
Eventually he managed to unify all the nearby European colonies, and then the whole area became a sanctuary state for people persecuted by the Puritans. And that's how Rhode Island has the country's oldest synagogue!
I'm sorry to say that he was a little iffy about slavery, particularly when they were Native Americans captured during wars with other peoples, but he did try really hard to legislate against importing African slaves, and against slavery for life and passing down the status of slave to one's children... he was outvoted, though.
So imagine how fun it would be to be in my family group chat and get frantic texts of Roger Williams factoids All. Damn. Day.
Oh, and Roger Williams memes!
Anyway, the park itself was actually pretty small, although it does contain a spring that used to mark the center of Providence Plantations... and this guy's grave, I guess:
So on we go to Weir Farm National Historic Site, a place that I fully admit that I knew nothing about other than that it was roughly on my route and had a passport stamp I could collect.
I've come to realize that it's never any use to go to a place just for a passport stamp and a quick poke around, because I will then ALWAYS be like, "Ugh, I've got to come back for a proper visit!"
Weir Farm didn't really feel like a place you could buzz through and see all the sites and move on with your life, although they do have house and studio tours, etc. Instead, it felt like a place that you needed to bring a picnic and some art supplies and a nice, long book to in order to really appreciate it:
I especially want to come back with my especially artsy younger kid and watch her be inspired. I don't know how you could walk around the grounds and NOT decide to set up your canvas and acrylics and start your en plein air masterpiece right away.
And while she paints, I will lounge nearby on a quilt in the grass, nibble on brie and sourdough French bread, and read a very long and very fascinating novel.
I don't know if it was specifically because I told Google Maps to keep me off the toll roads or because I told it keep me well away from New York City, but the rest of my journey after I pulled out of the Weir Farm parking lot was BONKERS. I'm not sure if I drove on a single highway? I am VERY sure that I drove on many, many, many residential streets! It was a bleak afternoon, chilly and rainy, and I spent it on the kind of slick, windy, hilly, rural roads that would have had me as carsick as a dog if I hadn't been in the driver's seat.
OMG it was charming, though. So freaking beautiful. I kept driving down into these absolutely magical valleys with little towns in them, and every single little town was smack in the middle of some kind of little fall festival, with hay bales and pumpkins and scarecrow decorations and people walking around in flannels or puffer vests. At one point, driving into the most magical valley yet, I noticed an especially large amount of flannel- and puffer vest-clad people congregating at the median, and as I drove past I saw that everyone was visiting a giant statue of the Headless Horseman chasing Ichabod Crane!
The worst part of a solo road trip is that when you're hours behind schedule and the road and the weather are poor and you're worried about driving windy, hilly roads after dark, you have to be your own bad guy and not let yourself take an hours-long detour to find a pay parking lot in a crowded autumn tourist town and fight the crowds to pay your respects to all the finest literary spots that Sleepy Hollow has to offer.
I'll visit properly when I come back to picnic at Weir Farm and take my tour of Thomas Edison's house!
As it was, I didn't find my hotel outside of Philadelphia until well into the night, and I fell asleep pretty much immediately after barricading the door to my room and wolfing down a peanut butter sandwich and some kettle chips.
Even though the kid's college was just a few minutes away, she was busy the next day learning until lunchtime, so I went back on my own to Valley Forge, because even though I'd been there twice already within the last few weeks, I had not yet paid homage to my own favorite hero of the American Revolution:
Baron von Steuben was a wonder, you guys. He was more or less openly gay, which they were not at all cool with back in Europe, but in the military and political world of brand-new America, everyone was seemingly cool with it, alluding to his relationships calmly and cheerfully in letters and such. I imagine this is entirely because he was an absolute beast of a war machine, and simultaneously a teacher so skilled that he could teach advanced drills and maneuvers without a shared language between him and his students.
Although the scholarship is clear, some scholars still currently speculate about von Steuben's sexuality, but I think that's only because in our contemporary society, we still don't have a clear understanding of how the queer experience was expressed and acknowledged and understood by historical societies. There was clearly some capacity for non-heterosexual expression--remember that exhibit in the New Bedford Whaling Museum:
But he certainly had male partners in life, and that was pretty well acknowledged and accepted by his social and career circles, as it should have been. And I just think it's low of places like Valley Forge to use some scholars' dithering as their excuse to completely erase a part of von Steuben's complete life, a part that was clearly very important to him, just to avoid having to deal with some visitors being pissed about it. Von Steuben was a hero and we would have lost the Revolutionary War without him, and if you're going to pitch a fit about him being queer then you're not as patriotic as you think you are.
Even though it was too short, this was the best visit, because I got to see that my daughters? Friends, I am thrilled to report to you that they thrive. There are ups and downs, of course, stressful encounters and new situations, a Greek class and an ocean weather class that are each harder than they seem, but all in all this seems like it's turning out to be a special, perfect semester in which each kid is in exactly the best place for her to be, doing fulfilling activities and having meaningful experiences, building relationships, having adventures, and otherwise just enjoying their lives.
P.S. Want to follow along with my craft projects, books I'm reading, dog-walking mishaps, encounters with Chainsaw Helicopters, and other various adventures on the daily? Find me on my Craft Knife Facebook page!
P.P.S. I just learned that there's a graphic novel biography of Baron von Steuben entitled Washington's Gay General! I just requested it from my public library!