Buckets of Rain

September 30, 2010

What a day!  Rain by the bucket.  Not just an occasional rain by the bucket, but bucket after bucket, after bucket.  It was like going through the carwash without the soap.  I tried romanticizing it – like – Misty clouds rise and fall along the roadside landscape.  Freshly washed leaves the colors of brown and red and yellow shine as we roll through Pennsylvania.  BUT this was just a fleeting thought drowned out by the buckets of rain. 

We had a ray of hope when the rain stopped while we were at Monticello.  A tour of Thomas Jefferson’s home began in the rain, but as it ended there truly was just a light mist.  In just the brief time we had at Monticello I learned how little I knew about Jefferson.  At 33 he wrote the Declaration of Independence and served as Vice-President, Secretary of State, President, Statesman – that I remembered.  It seems his mind never rested.  He was continually inventing things to make life better like a coffee urn! He borrowed ideas he saw and customized them for his home use.  He installed dumb waiters in his home to deliver food from the kitchen to the room off the dining room; he designed a pivoting door with shelves that allowed food to be placed on the shelves.  When the door was rotated the food was available to the butler who then served the guests. As a farmer he was one of the first to see the depletion of continuous tobacco crops on the soil and began crop rotations.  He tried new plant varieties, loved books, collected originals in their original language and then read them voraciously. 

The remainder of the day was spent defying the logic of the GPS to actually deliver us to our destination.  We arrived, but not without a few a few side of the road negotiations and aerobic map reading exercises.  Locked in our own battle with the GPS, we managed to miss the road to the Manassas Battlefield where Jackson received the nickname “Stonewall”.  Then we arrived too late to see the Antietam Civil War  Battlefield site of the bloodiest single day battle in US history. 

Tomorrow we are definitely going to Gettysburg – this was our major destination and I have complete confidence we will be there when they open.