Back and Forth Through Pennsylvania: Fort Necessity

I tell you what, when your kid attends college in Pennsylvania, it really gives you a chance to knock out those Pennsylvania national park sites!

I've done more USA roadtripping in the past 10 months than I usually do, and Pennsylvania is currently my favorite state to visit national park sites in. One, they're all free, and two, they're (mostly) all open 7 days a week! On this recent trip home from Philadelphia, my partner and I dared to drive home on a Wednesday, and were punished for our audacity by having First State National Historical Park, Hampton National Historical Site, and Monocacy National Battlefield all closed. 

But our good buddy Fort Necessity was open! On a Wednesday, even! 

A place that I had a blast visiting with the kids back when they were little and we were on yet another magical homeschool adventure probably isn't the best place for me to visit directly after dropping them off for their Spring semesters, because for some reason I always feel so much more bereft after this drop-off than I do after the Fall semester drop-off--which is why I *wanted* to visit First State National Historical Park, Hampton National Historical Site, or Monocacy National Battlefield instead, humph. But obviously the only thing worse than visiting a national park site and feeling sad that I miss my kids would be NOT visiting a national park site at all. 

A twelve-hour drive with NO learning?!? And NO passport stamps?!? Heaven forfend!

So bravely (and nostalgically) I marched onward to the fort.

And hallelujah, the fort's bathroom! My partner and I were currently in a fight because that morning he'd randomly called down to have the valet bring the car around while I was literally in the bathroom still getting ready for the day(?!?), and THEN when I met him in the lobby after freaking out to finish getting dressed and packed as fast as I could (I am positive I left something behind in that hotel room...), he told me he was going to go start the car and then come back inside to check out, so I walked ten feet away to the coffee carafes, but apparently while I had my back turned fiddling around with the coffee he indeed came back inside and checked out, but then he went back outside to the car and just sat there at the curb without saying so much as a peep to me, so I stood in the hotel lobby like an asshole for several minutes, sipping coffee and thinking, "Gee, it's taking him a long time to start the car..." 

Just between us, I feel like I have grown discernibly stupider in the past five years. And also, SO HAS HE.

ANYWAY, I would have happily wet my pants that morning before I asked to stop for a bathroom break, so thank goodness for a heated, comfy visitor center bathroom... with limited edition Halloween Bath and Body Works foaming hand soaps?

I love how hard some national park site's museums go. I blew the below photo up extra-large for you so you can admire the realistic expression of anguish on that poor guy's face as he supports his dead comrade: 

Below is one of my all-time favorite history facts:

When I die, bury me like Braddock!

I thought this was a really interesting way to preserve a cultural artifact:

It's a modern recreation of a war belt that could have circulated in the mid-1700s, but the beads that make it up are authentic glass trade beads from the early- to mid-1700s. It's so much more interesting than a modern plastic recreation war belt plus a display pile of these authentic glass beads would have been. It's also powerfully subversive, in that it reminds you that the beads that Europeans traded to the Native peoples were then used by the Native peoples to communicate intentions of war against the Europeans.

The French burned Fort Necessity immediately upon their victory, and afterwards much of the knowledge of the fort passed from living memory, so much so that the below model shows what the Fort Necessity National Battlefield first erected in 1932. That's what they thought Fort Necessity looked like!

This dinky little stack of sticks is what it actually looked like:

I think it's fun to see it in the snow, because the original Fort Necessity wasn't around long enough to experience a single snowfall:

I thought about the kids and missed them a lot on this visit. 2016, when they were 10 and 12, was a particularly great homeschool year for us, and this October road trip that we took to see several sites of the American Revolution was just about perfect. The kids were enthusiastic about everything we did and saw, soaked up every piece of information, skipped rocks across the Delaware at Washington's Crossing and sang "The Shot Heard 'Round the World" at the Minuteman battle site, walked the National Road and recited "The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere" in front of his statue, earned every Junior Ranger badge we came across and listened to Dear America diaries and The Matchlock Gun in the car between stops. Currently sitting, as I am, with the discomfort of not knowing what I should do next with my life, it's easy to sink into the nostalgia of the good old days and wish I could just do that again.

Also, I accidentally took several similar photos:

2025

2016

2025

2016

2016

2025

Last of all before getting back in the car for another eight hours, you've got to get your passport stamp, because learning is its own reward, but passport stamps are even better:

There's also a Junior Ranger badge program that's only available on-site, and if you've got more time (and the place isn't packed with snow) you should also visit Jumonville Glen, to see another spot where Washington acted like a dumbass.

So... is travelling around to collect national park passport stamps a suitable fulfilling purpose in life? Asking for a friend, so let me know!

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!

Exploring the Coast with My Sailor

Because when you visit your sailor at the edge of the ocean, of course you have to do ocean things!

Seeing one of my kids after missing them for a month is the best feeling ever, but weirdly, they get creeped out if I just want to sit and stare at them and pet their hair all day. So we had to plan some activities to see if we could space out my creepy mom moments to a sustainable level.

At this point, I just need to go on a tangent about the DIY Iced Coffee Bar at Cape Cod Bagels. We discovered it back in August and managed to visit it every day we were there, and on this trip I also visited it every day! It's essentially just a bank of chilled coffees in different flavors, with a separate area where you can add your cream and sugar. It is the most genius concept I have ever encountered, and I had a marvelous time mixing up different coffee flavors for myself, then perfectly sweetening everything to my exact likeness. 

I miss you, Cape Cod Bagels!

And why yes, I DID bring my kid's national parks passport book on this trip with me, just so she and I could do my favorite things for us to do together--collect passport stamps and visit museums! Because obviously you cannot collect your New Bedford Whaling National Historical Park passport stamp without also visiting the New Bedford Whaling Museum!

Please look at a picture of this animal that definitely really exists:

What, you've never seen a hyena whale before? Guess you're not as much of a sailor as you thought you were!

How about a bearded whale? Look at its little paws!

These are from Historiae Animalium by Conrad Gesner, who's definitely seen a real, live narwhal for his very own self:

I don't remember if this definitely real siren is from the same book, but it's certainly got the same look about it!

Y'all know how excited I get whenever I see a Marshall Islands stick map! It's the first map that ever blew my mind, and now I'm sort of low-key obsessed with the different ways that humans visualize their local geography:

Here's another interesting conflation of two of my Special Interests:

I present to you a map of the United States, embroidered by a young Miss Silvia Grinnell. Her father was a ship captain, and she was named after her mother. The map looks like it was pre-printed with the lines to embroider, although it's also very possible that Silvia drew those lines herself as part of the project. I love how the larger borders are pipe cleaners that she stitched to the fabric:

It wasn't uncommon for children of all sexes to be given this type of academic handwork--I mean, think of the beloved salt dough map of today!--but it IS uncommon for it to have survived, especially in such good condition. Alas that I no longer have any of my children's carefully crafted salt dough maps... much less their cookie cake maps, ahem. 

New Bedford is in a miniscule nook completely covered by two pipe cleaner pieces. I wonder if the conservators peeped between those pieces to see if she'd sneaked a special embroidered marker there for her hometown?

Here's my own hometown, below. I think it's interesting that she embroidered the names of the indigenous nations there, as she knew them:

My love for Moana is a running family joke, as is the fact that whenever we buy a month of Disney+ so we can watch the latest Star Wars or Marvel or Percy Jackson series, I also basically end up watching Moana every single day of that month. And sometimes in conversations or via text, I will randomly exhort my child or partner to "consider the coconut. Consider its tree," then continue to extol how we can "make our nets from the fibers," and "use the leaves to build fires," etc. I promise that I'm very fun to be around!

Anyway, does the below informational signage not sound EXACTLY like that song? I cackled when I saw it, lol:

There actually wasn't a ton about whaling itself at the museum, which I appreciated because whaling is pretty disturbing. Instead, it was information about whales--

--the culture of the appreciation, observation, and study of whales--

--and the culture of the whalers and those who worked on the whaling ships.

Included in this, I was delighted to see museum evidence of one of my Special Interests, historical boyfriends! It's still an open question among scholars how subversive queer expression would have even been on whaling ships during this time and place--perhaps not very!--but some of the very few first-person narratives known today include some intriguing ambiguity.

Just a few days after this, she'd be setting sail on her own tall ship not completely unlike this one!

After seeing the rest of the sites--and getting our passport stamps, of course!--I'd had a couple of other spots in mind to visit--

--but considering that I'd also spent the entire day bragging about how I'd been to the Cape Cod National Seashore twice in a matter of weeks and had seen copious sea lions both times, the kid decided that what she'd really like to do with our evening is go see some sea lions.

So we did!

You can tell I'm with one of my kids when I start taking photos of rocks and shells and weird stuff on the ground. If you're not obsessed with examining things that would be just perfect for your nature table, were you even a homeschooler?

This kid is definitely the beachiest one in the family after me, and she'd probably be even beachier than me if she wasn't so fair-skinned. So it was nice to hang out with someone who accidentally ended up getting just as wet as I accidentally ended up getting!

And this time I didn't have to dread driving back down the peninsula in the dark, because I had a confident and capable fellow adult to do it for me!

Afterwards, we picked up more pizza from the place next door to my hotel, and had settled in for our own little Family Movie Night, when the kid got a text from one of her fellow sea friends that it was going to be a good night for seeing bioluminescence. By this time, she'd seen the phenomenon several times herself, but I had never, so we hopped back in the car and went on another adventure!

The trouble with the bougie little town where the kid's program is located is that it's a bougie little town. Most of the waterfront is private, with little non-resident access or parking. She and her classmates mostly walked or biked to the beaches, and they all have stories to tell about security guards trying to kick them off of beaches they even had the owner's permission to be at. But the kid knew a couple of places where we could more or less park legally for a bit, assuming we could get in and out before the cops arrived. She directed me to one such place, where I parked, we got out of the car, and a male voice from the darkness immediately called out, "Can I help you?"

I cheerfully replied, "Nope!", and then we cheerfully (but quickly, ahem) ignored Random Man/Cat Burglar/Security Guard/Mob Boss/Serial Killer while we poked around the dark harborside, picking up little sticks and rocks and tossing them into the water to annoy the  phytoplankton to make them bioluminesce at us. It was VERY cool, but as soon as I'd watched it for about five seconds I whispered, "Let's go," the kid replied, "Yep," and we were off. 

We'll see each other again in Auckland!

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To the Coast to See My Sailor

My older kid is studying abroad this semester, conducting research on oceans and climate while crewing a tall ship in the South Pacific. Before that, though, she spent several weeks at the program's home base in Cape Cod, learning how to conduct research on oceans and climate and how to crew a tall ship.

I didn't relish going the entire semester without seeing my girl, so the week before she flew to Fiji to begin the sailing component of her experience, I drove back out to the coast for a super quick visit... and to bring home all the little luxuries that she didn't want to lug around and find a place for in her tiny ship bunk!

Bonus: the younger kid's college is on the way home-ish...

It's been a minute since I've taken such a long road trip as the sole driver, so I'd been dreading it, but honestly, other than the chronic backache, it was kind of awesome! I got through the entirety of Prairie Fires on audiobook with nobody trying to talk to me and thereby making me miss any interesting details. I got to decide when I wanted to gas up, which did not include running the car down to Empty while I continued searching for the mythical "low gas prices," ahem... I did not stop for fast food a single time because the boring-ass peanut butter crackers and granola bars and various little snackies I packed were quite interesting enough for me, even though this gas station advertisement did kind of intrigue me:

Is a sweet biscuit not a scone?

The only part it was really worth dreading, it turned out, was finding and checking into my hotel room. Why is every encounter with another human being so awkward?!? When I walked into the Holiday Inn, there was already a guy at the reception desk talking to the clerk, but after I'd been in line behind him for a couple of minutes, he ended whatever conversation he'd been having by announcing that I could just go ahead of him.

Of course I was all, "OMG no, I'm not in a hurry, you're fine, take all the time you need, etc.," but then he was all, "Eh, I'm just gonna make the reservation on my phone."

Cool, I guess? I already had a reservation, so I stepped up to the clerk and she started checking me in. But she kept asking me weird questions like, "Is anyone else joining you?" and "Did you just make this reservation?" and it was generally just weird all around. She seemed a little flustered and was like, "Normally, your receipt would already be printed so it's strange that it's not..." but she kept checking me in.

Then, though, she was literally handing me my keys, when she stopped and said, "You know what? Let me check one more thing." She clicked away at her computer, and then said, "Hmm... do you know [name of random stranger]."

ME: "No?"

HER: "Well, a couple of hours ago they got checked in under your reservation."

So apparently someone had come in, I have no idea if their name was even similar to mine or not, and the clerk on duty then had checked them in under my reservation, including having them sign the receipt with my name and home address on it. They put them in the room that had been reserved for me, and so when I actually came in, this clerk had just duplicated the booking to check me in, including giving me a set of key cards TO THE SAME ROOM THAT THIS OTHER STRANGER WAS ALREADY IN. 

I'm gonna be honest with you--if I'd keycarded my way into a hotel room that another human was already occupying, doing whatever they were happening to be doing at the time that I barged in, I would immediately turn around and just drive the eleven hours back home in the dark. My kid can mail me the stuff she doesn't want to take on the ship.

But crisis averted, so yay! So the clerk had to get her boss to fix the reservation, and by this time the guy had finished doing his phone stuff and was now standing in line behind me. As the boss was telling me about the room I'd now be staying in, confirming the amenities and whatever and assuring me it was a better room than my original one (I mean... I guess that could have been true?), the guy behind me loudly announced, "Hey, I'll share her room if I get to pay half-price!"

The clerk and I completely ignored him, and the boss was all, "Ha, ha," which, fine, but then the boss went to hand me my new key cards and just kept LOUDLY REPEATING MY ROOM NUMBER OUT LOUD. The clerk and I were both like, "OMG shhh!!!!!" 

Ugh. Fortunately, I didn't run into that guy again, but I also shoved the luggage bench against my door. I don't want anybody, on purpose or not, busting in on my hotel room!

But then, y'all. BUT THEN!

I decided to treat myself to take-out in celebration of a successful day driving, so I made a pick-up order at Olive Garden and headed out to grab it. On my way through the parking lot to the car, I passed a guy just hanging out with his six-pack near my car, which... okay, I guess? Drink in the parking lot at 8pm if that's your vibe? But then when I was at my car, he said, "Hey! I can guess what county in Indiana you're from!"

And then, Reader, he told me my county.

I was all, "?!?!?!?" as he happily explained that the number on my car registration sticker on my license plate said what county the registration is for, and he'd just happened to have memorized all the county codes in Indiana... WHICH HE, HIMSELF, WAS FROM.

I was just like, "Cool, cool, that's so cool, have such an awesome night, good to talk to you, bye," then later when Matt called me to see how my day had been, I vented at him about why are all men so weird and terrifying each in their own separate weird and terrifying way? And then I told him I had to go because my eggplant parmesan was getting cold, ahem.

Anyway, I haven't seen that guy around here, so I don't guess he's been driving the streets of the county looking for me, so it's probably fine.

And I'd apparently passed the Biscuits and Gravy Line sometime during the day, so this was my morning treat at the hotel breakfast:

When we'd all gone as a family to drop the big kid off, the rest of us left her settled into her new cabin and then spent the evening exploring a bit on the Cape Cod National Seashore, but the visitor centers had all been closed by then, so I hadn't gotten my National Parks Passport Stamp.

It turns out, to the surprise of absolutely nobody, that I am OBSESSED with collecting these Passport Stamps, so the next day, the whole purpose of my drive was to get to the Salt Pond Visitor Center in time to get my stamp.

I barely made it, but I DID make it!

I even had time for a very quick swing through the museum!

You know how I feel about the prehistoric native peoples and their artifacts!

I also love European artifacts. These pipe stems look exactly like the ones we mudlarked on the Thames! 

When we came to Cape Cod National Seashore when the kids were small, we all watched this super traumatizing documentary about how everyone used to drown right off the shore, and that's how the Coast Guard was invented. We still talk about horrifying that documentary was, but look! Early lifesaving equipment!

When they finally kicked me out of the visitor center, I did a little more exploring along the beach:

While I was walking around here taking photos, I saw someone bringing their Cape Cod Potato Chip bag over to the lighthouse, I guess so it could learn about its culture.

I saw so many sea lions, but I figured that since I was by myself I'd just enjoy them and not try to take photos of them. But here are some nice sea lion-less photos of the beach!

Eventually, I realized that I had just about assigned myself to driving back down the peninsula in full-on dark, sigh, so I reluctantly left the water and got back into my personal backache mobile for another hour, sigh.

My kid wasn't free to hang out until the next day, but happily, there was a pizza place next door to my hotel, and Dr. Strange was on cable, so that was my evening all taken care of!

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