Valley Forge to Hopewell Furnace

I used to drag my kids out to every national park site that had a Junior Ranger program, and now I drag myself out to every national park site that has a passport stamp for my book!

Okay, but iron making is randomly really interesting, though?

I honestly did just want to hit up the Hopewell Furnace National Historic Site only so I could collect its passport stamp, but also, one cannot simply collect one's passport stamp and leave--instead, one must do and see ALL THE THINGS. 

So we watched the intro film, looked at all the museum exhibits--

--and then walked the grounds and learned about iron making!

Hopewell Furnace is centrally located for all of your iron distribution needs.

Okay, so first you've got to make your own charcoal to fuel the forge, and just like in Stardew Valley, you make it by burning wood:

Then you cart it over to the storeroom--

--which is another short distance away from the top of the furnace where you dump it in:

It's super clever that the forge was built on a hillside, so that you could feed the fire at the top of the hill and collect the molten iron from the hearth at the bottom of the hill:

A giant water wheel powers pistons that force air into the furnace:

Obviously, I would have come to see this place solely for the water wheel!

Because of its rural location and the 12-hour shift length, the furnace site was essentially a company town, although the park information painted it as pretty idyllic, with competitive prices in the company store and a desegregated school. 

My partner poked around all the tenant buildings, but I only wanted to poke around the garden:

There wasn't a ranger around to ask if the residents had a particular need for dye and fiber plants, or if this was just a fun themed garden:

What do we think these orange flowers are? I want some!

This site was actually a lot more interesting than I thought it would be! I'm still surprised that they managed to walk me through iron making in a way that I could understand, and I can't believe that all their marketing materials don't just have photos of that giant water wheel.

AND their passport sticker sets were nearly a buck cheaper than the ones at Valley Forge just 25 miles away, grr. Hopewell Furnace National Historic Site is in the 1987 set!

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Falmouth to Philadelphia to Valley Forge

Oh, my gosh, you guys. This was the day that I had been actively looking forward to and dreading for years, the day that I settled my second and final kid into college and headed back home without her.

It was a long, tiring day, made purposefully so with an afternoon of presentations and receptions and family activities on top of the morning's work of actually moving kids in and all that entailed--it was kind of like the first day of sleepaway camp, when you want everyone too exhausted to feel homesick.

This was actually my partner's first time seeing the kid's college campus in person, so we also found time in between the emergency Target run and the presentation about the campus career center to walk him around a bit so he could see for himself how pretty it is:

These days, the kid often complains that "there are no interesting clouds" there, and it's true that, although the place is beautiful, in these photos there are no interesting clouds!

At the afternoon family reception, just before the parents were summarily kicked off campus, the president asked all the kids to say a loud "thank you" to everyone who had helped them get to that moment in their lives. I wasn't standing near my kid at that moment, as she was standing with her new roommates(!!!), but I saw her in profile, laughingly saying the words with all the other freshmen, and you guys. She's too young to really appreciate it, but at that moment I could feel all those people, the NICU nurse who helped me hold her for the first time, her great-grandfather who took her fishing, her favorite ballet instructor, the math teacher who taught her multiplication tricks and the best properties to land on in Monopoly, the college students who ran the drama day camp and cast her as a Star-Bellied Sneetch in a brown paper bag costume, the mom friends and parents of her kid friends who treat her like one of their own children, the summer camp counselor who told the kids they were pirates and had them do a night-time raid on the camp director's cabin, the instructor of her community college baking class who she said was mean but nevertheless taught her how to laminate dough, the boss of her very first part-time job... she is the legacy of everyone who has ever dealt with her caringly, or taught her an academic or life lesson, or healed her body, or loved her for exactly who she is.

Why on earth the college president would do this to me after everyone else at that college had worked so hard to keep me calm all day I do not know.

Meanwhile, my man was sitting over there in the shade just vibing. Nobody's moving that guy to tears--he's not even looking in the speaker's direction! Nor at his child! THAT direction is where the refreshments will soon be served!

When just the two of us finally got back in the car and drove off campus, my man, who is happy to vibe anywhere, asked where I wanted to go now, and I was all, "Sob and wail, can we go to Valley Forge?"

Reader, we could!

We'd have to wait until the next morning to go back for the visitor's center, because obviously I'm not leaving another passport stamp behind, but that evening were able to drive what I'd later learn was the outer line of defensive entrenchments:

There were places to step out and explore mock-ups of the cabins that the soldiers built for themselves--

--and, of course, a place to park and walk down the hill to wander around the farmhouse that once served as Washington's headquarters:

I'm trying to take a selfie in front of the room where I think Alexander Hamilton stayed, but there is definitely a ghost in that second-story window...

The next morning at the visitor center, I tried not to be jealous of the family with two bored little kids running around holding their Junior Ranger badge books, even though once upon a time eight years ago I got to be the one at the visitor center with two bored little kids running around holding their Junior Ranger badge books, and there was probably some empty nester there at the same time who was jealous of *me*. 

I remembered from last time that this is supposed to be an extremely accurate model of George Washington:

I did not buy this book about search and rescue in national parks (I asked my public library to buy it instead), but I did buy a set of national park stickers for my passport book--Valley Forge is 1991!

The morning at Valley Forge, since it was so close, let me put off the moment where I felt like I really and truly left the kids and started home, but eventually the time came when I was going to have to either buy a tram ticket to tour the park again or get in the car, and the tram looked hot and crowded, so off we went...

...for a total of about 25 miles, because I found another national park site I figured we might as well stop at. You know, since we were in the area!

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On the Way To College, But Also the Beach!

 

When you drop your child off at college, you cannot just go back to your hotel room and cry.

Just... I tried that once, okay? It's not a great strategy. Once I got started, I did not stop crying for a week. 

Instead, go somewhere. Anywhere. Ideally, someplace where you can DO something and not just sit, because if you just sit you might start crying, and if you start crying right when you drop them off you won't stop again for at least a week.

So the three of us spent most of the day with the older kid, moving her into her temporary new digs on the campus of the organization where she's going to help crew a tall ship and perform oceanography research later this fall--

--and then the rest of us drove up the coast to the Cape Cod National Seashore. You'll be sad to learn that we didn't arrive in time for me to snag my coveted passport stamp from the visitor's center, but we DID arrive with enough daylight left in the day to have a good, long walk along the shore.

But y'all know why I really wanted to go to a Cape Cod beach, right?

!!!!!!!

I love sharks. I love how they swim, I love the idea of booping them smartly on the nose so they won't bite you, I love tracking them online to see where they're swimming, I love asking people what their favorite thing about sharks is (mine is the Ampullae of Lorenzini!), and while I definitely do not want to get eaten by a shark, I love being somewhere where it *could* conceivably happen!

Last time we were here it was all four of us and we made a day of it. This time, the three of us all planned to stay out of the water and just walk, but as usual, most of us were more careful than I was--

--and somehow I ended up so wet that on the way home I had to sit on a towel like a toddler, but whatever. It's always worth it to touch the Atlantic Ocean!

I've read that since sharks hunt seals, if you see a seal, there's a good chance that there's a shark nearby, so imagine my excitement when we saw this!

Seals!!!

We saw SO many seals on this beautiful evening, and they were all adorable and looked like dogs and surely there were sharks stalking them just out of sight so we basically saw a bunch of sharks, too.

Also, so many pretty rocks and shells that we did not keep because we were on national park property--

--such a beautiful sunset happening on one side of us--

--and on our other side, always more seals!

I still VERY much missed my older kid, but you can't cry when you're walking by the ocean and seeing real, live seals in the wild, and it was nice to have this calm, quiet, lovely time with my younger kid who would be starting her own college adventure in less than 48 hours:

The kid even did me the huge favor of asking for my camera, and then getting some sneaky photos of me as payback for 18 years of sneaky photos of her living her life in the wild:

I look like I'm taking a contemplative evening walk, but I have left everyone behind and am marching along the beach focusing all my mental powers on searching for seals.

Found one!

And then, of course, the poor kid was reminded that even when she's holding my big camera, there's still no escape from the doting mommy photos:

We left at the ideal time, ie. not until my partner was starving, I was soaked to the skin and starting to shiver, and the kid had to pee like crazy.

It was perfect, because nothing less than genuine physical emergencies can generally tear me away from the beach, and by the time we got back to the hotel I, at least, was too tired out to do more than take a hot shower, put on questionably clean sweats, scarf my leftover burrito from lunch, and fall asleep without thoughts of despair about what my life is supposed to look like now that its entire purpose is all grown up and about to leave me alone with just my thoughts for miserable company.

Ahem.

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On the Way to College We Stopped at Niagara Falls

Thank goodness both kids are light packers, or I don't know how we'd have gotten them both to college at the same time. As it was, we fit four adults, two Frakta bags, four Frakta bag knock-offs (I can't believe IKEA discontinued this college move-in staple!), one duffle bag, and three backpacks into a compact SUV with a canvas car topper.

Oh, and in Cleveland we added a few bags of candy, as well... College kids need their snack hauls!

Geography is weird. Do I understand why the route that looks like it detours so far north is only 20 miles longer than the route that looks like it goes pretty much straight to Massachusetts? 

No. No, I do not. I picked it, though, because it's the road less traveled, AND because it includes one of my favorite overhyped but iconic detours into Americana:

The last time we visited Niagara Falls, we HATED the Canadian side, but parking in Niagara Falls State Park on the US side and walking around Goat Island is always a good time:

It's always SO crowded, though!

It IS kind of the perfect roadside stop, though. For the price of parking you can just wander around and get some fresh air, take photos, maybe buy an ice cream, and also, there's a natural wonder right there!

We did a bit more hiking than the kids technically agreed to (one of my many annoying traits, according to my children, is how I constantly goad everyone into sightseeing beyond the agreed time/geographical range by exclaiming that who knows when we'll ever come here again! We should seize this moment that has been gifted us, because our time here together is precious! These poor kids have been to Niagara Falls three times in their lives so far, and every time I act like it's going to disappear forever the second we drive away)--

--so much so that my older kid and I, having paused to look at a weird bird, looked up to notice these two criminals CUTTING A SWITCHBACK!!!

I guess I can't guarantee that my partner knows any better, but that teenager who's tugging him along is a Girl Scout who has listened at least once, and more likely four times, to my lecture to the troop entitled "Do Not Cut Switchbacks Let Me Tell You a Story about a Boy Scout Who Did That Once and Was Never Seen Again."

The two criminals looked up to notice us gasping and exclaiming and clutching our pearls and thought we were trying to gesture to them to pose for a pic. So... cheese, I guess!

Do you think there's ever an off-season for Niagara Falls? I feel like I would like it so much more if I had it all to myself, ahem. Like, forget taking a book and sitting on a bench and enjoying the view while reading and eating a snack--I had to wait in line in a crowd of tourists just to take these pics!

As beautiful as Niagara Falls is, eventually the groceries back at the car start to loom ever more appealingly in one's mind, so we walked the long way back to our parking spot, and continued our family road trip tradition of making peanut butter and jelly sandwiches out of the back of the car, balancing paper plates and bread bags precariously on top of Frakta bags and backpacks, then hopped in and noshed our way the long way through New York, because we'll generally be damned if we take a toll road.

Next stop: the East Coast!

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