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!

Gettysburg to Philadelphia to Columbus to Home

The battle ended and the armies moved on, leaving over 7,000 corpses and several hundred amputated limbs lying wherever they'd fallen or been tossed. The civilians came back or came out of hiding and put the place back together again, burying everybody and everything wherever they could be buried, in shallow graves and mass graves and here and there anywhere there was a spot, sometimes marked and sometimes not. A local lawyer, David Wills, organized the creation of a national cemetery for the Union dead adjacent to the local cemetery, and over the next few months all the corpses who could be found who were Union soldiers (and a few who probably weren't but got caught up in the mix) were moved there. 

Meanwhile, the Confederate corpses stayed in their various shallow graves for several more years, until a local doctor organized the exhumation of whoever could still be found and had them sent to proper consecrated cemeteries back in the former Confederate states. If you want to see a couple of people who have Big Feelings about this and are willing to say so with their full government names, you should check out the Comments section of this blog post from the sadly now defunct Gettysburg National Military Park blog. In it, some guy named John Eady Simmons, Jr. says that the Union soldiers were "misled by Lincoln!" That's not something that you want on the first page of a Google search of your name!

Anyway, a few months after the battle, when the corpses of the Union soldiers had been more or less settled into the brand-new national cemetery, it was officially dedicated and consecrated. Abraham Lincoln came and gave a speech. He stayed with David Wills, and likely wrote some of the speech in his house. He asked to meet John Burns, and they hung out for about an hour and by all accounts had a lovely chat. 

And on November 19, he gave this speech:

Back in our homeschooling days, it took my eight-year-old six months to fully memorize that two-minute speech (So many big words! So many relative clauses!), and I'm still chuffed at her accomplishment.

Also, she managed it in 1:23. She can talk faster than Lincoln, woot!

It was a beautiful day to walk around the national cemetery--

--and see Lincoln's handwritten speech in the place where he'd read it--

--but eventually we had to get back on the actual road, since the Battle of Gettysburg was meant to be by no means the main event of this week.

Okay, one more detour...

At our dinner at Dobbin House the previous night, Mr. Craft Knife had a local cider so delicious that he looked to see if 1) the cidery is open to the public, and 2) if it was reasonably on our path. It is, and it was!

Okay, now we're REALLY on our way!

Because we can be productive and efficient when we need to, by that evening we were enjoying a walk around the little kid's college campus after packing most of her stuff into the car (these knock-off Frakta bags are the BEST things to pack in! They hold a ton, they've got handles so they're easy to carry, and when they're empty they fold up flat and can be thrown in the top of a dorm room closet until they're ready to fill up again):

By the next morning we'd packed up the rest of it and were on the road, by that evening I was in Ohio, dancing to a band that, after an hour of trying to play the music they wanted, had submitted to the crowd and was indulging all the parents of the next day's college graduates with covers of classic 90s songs (the lead singer had to literally read the lyrics for each song off of her phone, and WE DID NOT CARE!), by the morning after that I was snagging seats inside a college gym--

--and by that afternoon I had myself a brand-new college graduate!

And then we packed her, up, too, and drove another four hours back home.

This big kid has grown up so much from that tiny little moppet with messy blonde curls who loved dinosaurs and baby farm animals and interesting rocks. For a while, I really longed for that little kid again--not because I wanted her instead of my own grown-up daughter, but because in retrospect, those days were so magical, and, it turns out, so fleeting. Tangential, but now I, too, have become the person who tells parents of young children in a slightly too intense tone to cherish the present because it's gone before you know it, and the parents always nod and agree but I know they're rolling their eyes because why do all older women keep telling them that but SOMEDAY THEY WILL KNOW WHY.

But anyway, yes, I still miss that little kid, and the best day of my life would be to somehow be a time traveler and get to babysit her and her even littler sister and see those little faces and hear those little voices again, but I wouldn't trade that little version for my own grown-up daughter for anything in the world. It's excellent to have a kid who's all grown up, and you can see that they're thoughtful and kind, they're generous, they're funny, they're happy to be alive and excited to see and do everything they can, but they're still also your kid who will hang out with you and listen to all your boring stories and tell you much more interesting stories in return. And obviously, they still love dinosaurs and baby farm animals and, most of all, interesting rocks.

In related news, if you know of any great job openings for early career environmental scientists, please send them my way!

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!

In Which John Burns Is My Favorite Old Coot Of Gettysburg

Let's go on a road trip!

Ohio has both a brand-new Wawa and a brand-new Buccees. Mr. Craft Knife and I tried the Buccees a few weeks prior when it was more crowded than Disneyland and I did NOT get the hype, but what with all our drives back and forth to Pennsylvania, I DO now get the Wawa hype!

I didn't ever tell you the story about how the kid and I messed up ordering at Wawa SOOOOO badly during our long-ago trip to see the college that would become her alma mater, because it is genuinely humiliating and the kid and I vowed never to speak of it again (while still almost constantly referring to it to each other, because we literally cannot process it, it was so embarrassing). But because of that, every time I visit a Wawa and its ordering kiosk has actual instructions, I always take a picture and get a little madder at the Independence Hall Wawa. I hate you, you guys! You exist in one of the biggest tourist spots in the country--WHY IS YOUR SPECIFIC ORDERING KIOSK SO NON-INTUITIVE?!? WHY ARE YOU SO HIGH-KEY RUDE ABOUT IT!!!

I once again managed to convince Mr. Craft Knife not only to come with me on this trip to pick our daughter up from college, but also to make a proper sightseeing trip of it, so I had someone to take pictures of me chatting with Lincoln at Gettysburg National Military Park!

Bro is soooo much taller than me--my feet barely even reach the ground in front of his favorite reading bench!

Also, he is the only person in the family patient enough to drive me wherever along the battlefield I want to go, hang out with me while I read every plaque, stand where I tell him to stand while I take photos of him in front of every significant (and insignificant) spot, and basically just do whatever I tell him to do while I am also being very, very, very boring about it.

I can remember the exact moment, approximately a decade ago, when I let a friend borrow my audio tour of Gettysburg on CD, but it's definitely too late to ask for it back now, ahem, so instead, Mr. Craft Knife and I relied on the NPS app for this first day of battlefield touring.

Here we are looking northwest towards the McPherson Farm:

On the morning of June 30, 1863, soldiers from the US cavalry and soldiers from the Confederate infantry were VERY surprised to discover each other on the road in front of McPherson's barn. In the image below, the road, Chambersburg Pike (because it runs from Chambersburg!) is the Hwy 30 just to the north of the McPherson Farm label, which marks McPherson's barn. My photos are taken from around the 1st Brigade 1st Division Cavalry Corps memorial.

This Confederate army, headed by Robert E. Lee, had sneaked past the US forces and into Pennsylvania, hoping to draw the US army out of the Confederate territories for the summer so that the Southern farmers could get a proper harvest for the first time since the war had begun, the better for the Confederates to steal it all later. He also hoped that putting battles in front of Northern faces would convince Northern politicians to press for peace, because who wants a battle right in front of their face (spoiler alert: definitely not the citizens of Gettysburg!)? He'd accomplished the sneaking part, and now he was stationed in Chambersburg, and his entire 75,000-person army was stretched in a big semi-circle over and around Gettysburg, busy pillaging and raiding and looting the countryside.

But the Union was chasing them north, just like Lee had wanted, except that Lee didn't know exactly where they were, because his cavalry, headed by Jeb Stuart, was also out and about, wandering around far from home base, and if Stuart sent Lee any communications about the location of Union troops, Lee didn't receive them.

The Union didn't know where the Confederate army was, either, but their 2,700-horse cavalry was nearby, trotting ahead of the army keeping their eyes open, and that's who spotted the Confederate infantry marching down Chambersburg Pike towards Gettysburg on June 30. The Confederates spotted them, too. 

And then both sets of forces literally noped out, lol! They both just reversed themselves right back where they came from and decided they'd deal with it tomorrow.

Which was July 1, 1863!

So, the morning of July 1, the Union cavalry had set up super early on Chambersburg Pike (the yellow road on the map), around the Herrs Ridge Road line (far left), keeping an eye out for the inevitable march of the infantry to show up from the west. When they spotted each other, that's when the Battle of Gettysburg began:

So, you've got 2,700 Union cavalry versus 10,000 Confederate infantry. Both sets of forces are basically just trying to hold off the other set until reinforcements arrive, but it's harder for the cavalry, because not only were they fewer in number, but they also didn't actually fight on horseback, so some of the cavalry had to opt out of fighting just to hold everyone else's horses for them. But it also sucks for the infantry, because every time they have to fight they basically all have to stop marching, and most of them have to get off the road and scramble over ditches and fences so they can line up right. And then they succeed in pushing the cavalry back a little bit, which the cavalry had actually planned for so they've got a few spots down Chambersburg Pike where they can retreat, and they have time to do that because before the infantry can follow them, they keep having to scramble back out of the fields and pastures and back into lines on the road.

Late in the morning, the Union cavalry finally got their first infantry reinforcements, the 1st Corp led by General Reynolds. He deployed the infantry to the north and south of Chambersburg Pike, including in that woods at the bottom of the picture. The woods mark the spot where he was also almost immediately killed, poor dude. Abner Doubleday was field promoted to take his place. But later that day, when General Meade finally arrived, he demoted Doubleday and made somebody else the 1st Corps Commander, and Doubleday pretty much sulked about that for the rest of his life.

Also, he maybe invented baseball.

The best part of the Google Map is that you can use all the memorials to figure out where everybody was in the battle. My favorite memorial is for John Burns, just north of the woods. He was just some old dude, a random pissed off civilian who'd already been agitating against the Confederate occupation in the previous days (including citizen arresting a few Confederates during their earlier pass-through, lol!), and who on this day took himself out onto the battlefield with an antique Revolutionary War musket to get those damn Confederates off his lawn, goddamnit! 

At one point, he managed to wheedle a proper rifle off of a wounded Union infantryman, and at another point, the general of the Pennsylvania infantry was able to convince him to at least go fight in the woods where he'd be out of the sun (and possibly the way, ahem). Burns paid him back, though, by fighting like a total badass in the woods, even shooting a Confederate officer clean off his horse. And later, when he was wounded and had to be left on the field while the Union soldiers retreated (more on that later), he convinced the Confederates that he was actually a non-combatant who'd just happened to get caught up in the cross-fire. They apparently didn't recognize him from his earlier agitation against Confederate troops, so they let him go back to town, where he recovered from his wounds and lived another nine years as a national hero.

Fun fact: when Abraham Lincoln came to Gettysburg the next year to dedicate the new national cemetery, he was asked if there was anything he wanted to do in town, and he replied that actually, he'd quite like to meet John Burns. So he did, and by all reports the two got along great!

Anyway, it's a good thing that Reynolds had deployed some of the Union forces north of Chambersburg Pike, because there was a whole northern segment of the Confederates, who'd been pillaging and looting north of Gettysburg, who had now managed to bust their butts to get back down south to meet those Union forces. They had a whole other fight on Oak Ridge, north of Chambersburg Pike and north of Gettysburg:

Buford's monument marks where that morning fighting was. Lincoln Highway is what they're calling Chambersburg Pike. At the bottom you can see the north edge of Gettysburg.

This spot has a nice observation tower where you can look out onto most of the first day's fighting:

This view shows where the Confederate forces came from the north:

And this view is to the southwest, back toward Chambersburg Pike and the morning battles:

There was a lot of back-and-forthing, and the monuments here are interesting to read because they're all, "In this spot so-and-so division was posted, then they advanced and shot some people, then they retreated and were shot at, then they advanced again for a little bit and did some more shooting, then they were chased screaming through town. Most of them died." Out of the 296 soldiers from the Pennsylvania division that this monument memorializes, seven were killed, 52 were wounded, and 31 were either captured or just plain went missing:

These new Confederate forces coming in from the north actually overwhelmed the Union force, who retreated south through the streets of Gettysburg (while the citizens cowered in their basements) all the way through town. Just south of town were two hills, one wooded and one bare, and that's where the Union was finally able to make their stand to end out the first day of battle.

The Gettysburg National Cemetery/Evergreen Cemetery area and Culp's Hill are where they ended up: 

And that's the end of the first day of battle!

Next up: dinner in a former field hospital, then a ghost tour with the world's most reluctant ghost tour guide.

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!