Katie and Dan's Travels

This entry will cover a fair amount of ground, beginning with our travels from Warm Springs to spending a night in Staunton (called “Stanton” locally), traveling up onto Skyline Drive, spending the night at Big Meadow, and finally arriving to spend a night in Berryville with Polly and John Crawford and awakening in the morning to 2″ of wet snow on the ground!

…It turned out to be a little after the peak color season so we had the road very much to ourselves, picnic-ed in a deserted picnic ground (even the bears had left as there were no more soft touches to be found cooking lunch for them. One of the wonderful features of the drive was the huge variety of trees to be seen not only along the road, but out on the ridges and hills and down into the valleys; you could see by the patches of color that it is a wonderfully mixed deciduous forest, full of trees which we do not know at all – very frustrating not to be able to identify a third of the trees we were seeing.

…This is an excellent museum, with very well done displays of the cultural history of the area and a painting gallery full of little treasures, with two Gilbert Stuart portraits, and others by Constable, Gainsborough, Sir Joshua Reynolds, Guardi and several others; a wonderful treat in an unexpected place.

Both men ended their lives in debt, and largely for the same reasons: public service had high expectations of its high-level servants but was not willing to reimburse them for the expenses required to fulfill the expectations. jJefferson also bought everything he could lay his hands on related to his many passions and pursuits; he shipped back 86 cases of belongings from France. The Monroe house is small and was lovely and what original furnishings are left are beautiful. There were numerous things I didn’t know about Monroe, and the one that springs to mind is that Mrs Monroe, who had learned French well during their first term of service in France, was responsible for going in person to the Bastille to rescue the wife of one of the Monroe’s oldest friends: In Paris, as wife of the American Minister during the Reign of Terror, she helped secure the release of Madame La Fayette, wife of the Marquis de Lafayette when she learned of her imprisonment and threatened death by guillotine. … While in France, the Monroes’ daughter Eliza became friends with Hortense de Beauharnais, step-daughter of Napoleon, and both girls received their education in the school of Madame Jeanne Campan, who had been an advisor on court etiquette to Marie Antoinette.

…It’s especially pertinent when you contemplate the long hard work the people of that time put into building for their unknown descendants the civil society that we inherited and the value they placed on education as being critical to the success of the society.