We spent yesterday exploring Yorktown, where George Washington’s army, assisted by several thousand French soldiers, defeated the British in 1781, resulting in the end of the American Revolution, and independence for a new nation.

Yorktown was established in 1691, and by the early 1700s, it was a busy shipping port. Strategically located at the mouth of the York River, it was also important to the defense of Richmond and the rest of Virginia. So it was probably inevitable that the war would come here.

Yorktown Battlefield is part of Colonial National Historical Park, and is administered by the National Park Service. We started at the Battlefield Visitor Center, where a short video tells the story of the siege and battle that took place here. Then we boarded one of the free trolleys for a tour of the community.

Back at the Visitor Center, we then walked to the Yorktown Victory Monument, which was the first monument authorized by the Continental Congress, just after the battle. However, it took another 100 years before the monument was actually erected.

Then we continued into the old downtown section, where the main street is lined with historic buildings, including the handsome Thomas Nelson House. Nelson was the Governor of Virginia during the Revolutionary War, and also the commander of the Virginia Militia. During the siege of Yorktown, he directed artillery fire against the town, including his own home, to drive the British out. The house still shows the scars of American cannon balls.

We retrieved our van and drove the Battlefield Tour, which took us past locations occupied by British, American, and French troops during the battle. Not much remains except earthen redoubts and a few cannons, and information signs telling visitors what took place there.

The Augustine Moore House, where the surrender negotiations took place, was closed, so we couldn’t tour it. But we did stop to take some pictures.   

I have to say that overall, we were rather disappointed in Yorktown. Maybe we’ve been spoiled by our visits to places like Valley Forge, Gettysburg, and the Little Bighorn Battlefield, all administered by the National Park Service. But while those historic locations all have rather impressive museums, and lots of statues and monuments, at Yorktown there wasn’t much to see.

It took all of five minutes to see all there was to see in the small museum in the Visitor Center, and except for some cannon and the Victory Monument, and the buildings in town, the rest of the battlefield is pretty much open fields, a few earthen redoubts, and signs. No statues, no monuments.

Yes, it is an experience to stand on the hallowed ground where it all happened, but I would think that Yorktown, where we finally wrested our freedom from the grip of the greatest military power in the world at that time, deserves more. Terry and I were both left with the feeling of “is that all there is?”

I’d be interested to know what readers who have been to Yorktown have to say.

While we were out sightseeing, Bad Nick was busy posting a new Bad Nick Blog titled Abuse Isn’t A Right. Check it out and leave a comment.

Thought For The Day – Beautiful young people are acts of nature, but beautiful old people are works of art.

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Yesterday we drove 75 miles to Valley Forge National Historical Park, where the Continental Army, under George Washington, spent the hard winter of 1777-1778 during the American Revolution.

Being history nuts, this was a real treat for us, and we enjoyed immersing ourselves in this shrine to American liberty. We also learned a lot that we didn’t know about that pivotal time in our nation’s past.

Our first stop was the Visitors Center, where we browsed through displays on the army Winter Encampment, and then watched an 18 minute video about the events leading up to General Washington choosing Valley Forge as his winter headquarters, and what took place at Valley Forge.   

Then we drove the ten mile Auto Tour Route through the park, stopping to check out replicas of the crude cabins that the soldiers lived in at Valley Forge. Twelve men lived in each cabin, which they built themselves, using meager tools and sheer manpower, under harsh conditions.

Except for a brief skirmish with the British in September, 1777, no battles were fought at Valley Forge, though as many as 2,000 troops, one tenth of the total wintering here, died of diseases such as influenza, typhus, and dysentery. But Washington was prepared for an attack by the enemy, who had seized nearby Philadelphia. The tour passed by several cannon emplacements.

The Tour Route passes by monuments to the different regiments who spent the winter at Valley Forge, as well as statues of the generals who commanded them, such as Anthony Wayne, who had a long and distinguished career of service to his country.

Another key player was the Prussian General Friedrich Wilhelm von Steuben, who trained Washington’s ragtag army and turned them into a fit fighting force.

One stop was at the beautiful National Memorial Arch, dedicated to the soldiers who spent the winter at Valley Forge.

Rank has its privileges, and Washington spent the winter in relative comfort at the handsome Isaac Potts home, which is included in the free tour of the park.

The house is furnished with period items, and decorated as it would have been during Washington’s time there.

By the time we finished our tour of Valley Forge, it was 5 p.m., and we had to fight traffic to get back to the Pennsylvania Turnpike and headed back west. We couldn’t leave the area without one more stop at the Shady Maple Smorgasbord, and as it turns out, Tuesday is seafood night. They had four kinds of shrimp, grilled salmon and swordfish, crab cakes, and mussels, as well as steak, chicken, and lots of other goodies. We left the place absolutely stuffed.

When we came through Ephrata on the drive back to the Thousand Trails campground, the main street was closed down for the Ephrata Fair, which takes place this week, and we had to detour around a couple of blocks. We noticed that the sidewalks were lined with chairs where people had saved themselves a space for all of the fun events, and I remarked to Terry that in a lot of places, those chairs would have disappeared overnight. Don’t you just love small towns? 

Back at the motorhome, we watched some TV, answered some e-mails,and it was bedtime. We were tired after our long day of sightseeing, and that bed sure looked good!

Bad Nick has been quiet for too long, but something fired him up yesterday and he posted a new Bad Nick Blog titled We Owe You Nothing. Check it out and leave a comment.

Thought For The Day – If you can smile when things go wrong, you have someone in mind to blame.

Many people have asked me how I come up with something new to write about every day in the blog. Usually it’s no problem; I write about our travels when we’re on the move, and about the RV lifestyle in general when we’re stationary for  awhile. And sometimes I stumble across something totally unexpected I want to share with my readers. Yesterday was such a day.

When I drove into downtown Salt Lake City to do some more genealogy research at the Family History Library yesterday, there was a crowd of people, a contingent of Utah Highway patrol Officers,  a horse drawn hearse, and several news crews across the street from the library.

As it turns out, it was the funeral for world famous artist Arnold Friberg, who died Thursday, at the age of 96. Friberg was known for his patriotic and religious paintings. His work also included the posters for the Cecil B. DeMille movie The Ten Commandments, for which he was nominated for the Academy Award; paintings depicting scenes from the Book of Mormon;  and his masterpiece work Prayer At Valley Forge, portraying George Washington kneeling next to his horse, praying for guidance during the darkest days of the American Revolution.

Fribeg was also famous for over 300 paintings he created to honor the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, and he was a beloved friend to the Mounties. A squad of Mounties, in their trademark dress uniform known as the Red Serge, the scarlet tunic, worn with the flat brimmed Stetson hat and high boots, were on hand to escort his hearse to a nearby cemetery.

A squad of Mounties in full dress uniform is something very few people ever see in the United States. The Mounties’ everyday working uniform is a grey shirt with dark blue tie, blue trousers, ankle length patrol boots  and a regular policeman’s style cap. The Red Serge is worn only for special formal occasions. A news reporter at the scene said Friberg loved pomp and ceremony, and his funeral certainly provided that, in a grand way.

After watching the Mounties march off behind the hearse, I went up to the second floor of the Family History library, where they have a large bank of computers where visitors can do their research. These computers are hooked up to just about every online genealogy resource that exists. It would cost a person a small fortune to subscribe to all of these websites and services, but it’s all free here.

Half of the second floor has aisle after aisle of cabinets filled with microfilms that contain records for millions of people.

Each box contains a separate filmstrip, and each strip has hundreds, some even thousands, of pieces of data. Everything from court records, to birth, wedding and death records, newspaper items, land records and deeds, and much, much more.

In this age of computers and internet access, I had forgotten a lesson from my early newspaper days that I was reminded of in a big way yesterday. When you are sitting at a viewer, cranking through page after page of microfilm to get to what you are looking for, you can very easily get what can best be described as a form of motion sickness as the images fly past your eyes. Some people experience the same thing when trying to read a book or newspaper while riding in a car. After about three hours, I was so nauseated, and had such a headache, that I had to give up for the day.  When I go back next week, I’ll pace myself better so that doesn’t happen again!

Back at the RV park, I picked up Terry and we went to two different Joann Fabrics stores to get enough of a particular yarn she needed to finish a project she is working on, then we had dinner and went home to a quiet evening.

Today we have some visitors coming by, and then we may drive over to check out the Great Salt Lake. Or, if it’s too hot, we may just stay home and enjoy the air conditioning.

Thought For The Day -  Success is not the key to happiness. Happiness is the key to success. If you love what you are doing, you will be successful.

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After a chilly night in the parking lot of the Wal-Mart in Gallipolis, Ohio, we were up bright and early yesterday morning. There were several things we wanted to see locally, so I went inside the store and obtained permission to leave our motorhome there for a couple of hours while we went exploring in the van.

Gallipolis was settled in the late 1700s by French aristocrats who fled the old country to escape the guillotine. It is the hometown of Bob Evans, founder of the Bob Evans Restaurant chain, and the family farm is now a tourist attraction that includes an RV park offering water and electric hookups and a dump station for $15/night.

While exploring the friendly community, we noticed several back in RV sites with water and electric hookups at a Public Access boat launch on the bank of the Ohio River downtown. I stopped at City Hall to ask about the sites, and learned that RVers passing through the area can stay either for free, for $10 a night, or for $25 a night, depending on which secretary you want to believe. For free or $10 a night, I’d stay a while just to watch the riverboats going by, but for $25 a night, I’d pass.

This trip it didn’t matter, because we had a lot of miles to cover yet. We crossed the river on the Silver Memorial Bridge, and I think I may be getting over my bridge phobia, because I didn’t snivel once. The original Silver Bridge here collapsed in 1967, throwing 70 cars into the river below and claiming 46 lives. Maybe I’m not over my phobia after all, and I just figured lighting wouldn’t strike twice in the same place.

On the West Virginia side of the river, Point Pleasant is a charming little town with enough to see and do to keep visitors busy for several days. In 1774, a force of Virginia militia was ambushed here by Shawnee and Mingo Indians and the fierce battle lasted for hours. In the end, 75 militiamen were killed, along with an estimated 33 Indians. Many consider this to be the first battle of the American Revolution. Today a small park on the riverfront where the battle took place includes an 84 foot high granite obelisk honoring the men who fought and died here.

Point Pleasant also has a place in paranormal history. Here, in 1966, a strange winged man-like creature that became known as Mothman was reportedly sighted. Since then there have been several reported sightings of the creature, usually before disasters. Several people claimed to see Mothman perched high in the girders of the original Silver Bridge before it collapsed. Since then, Mothman has become a worldwide phenomenon, with mention in documentary films, movies and television specials.

Sure, it’s probably just the figment of imaginations gone wild, but the folks in Point Pleasant took it serious enough to erect a state of Mothman on Main Street downtown, and there is a Mothman Museum just across the street.

With our sightseeing over, we returned to Gallipolis, picked up the motorhome, and crossed the river again. On the Ohio side of the river, U.S. Highway 35 had been a very nice divided four lane, but  a couple of miles into West Virginia, it dropped down to a two lane road with no shoulders, and lots of curves for maybe 25 miles, and then it became divided four lane again.

Before long we joined Interstate 64 and followed it east a few miles into Charleston, where we picked up Interstate 77 south past the gold domed State Capitol building. Traffic was pretty heavy in Charleston, but before long we put the city behind us, and Interstate 77 became the West Virginia Turnpike.

For the next hundred miles we climbed up and around one mountain after another, the Winnebago doing just fine. I can’t believe the power this thing has! The constant climbing did affect our fuel mileage, though. The day before, we averaged 8.1 miles per gallon across relatively flat Indiana and Ohio, according to the Silverleaf, and yesterday our average was right at 7 miles per gallon.

It cost $10.50 in tolls to travel from Charleston to the state line, but I don’t think they spend much of that money on highway improvements, because that was one rough road in many places!

We crossed into Virginia, stopped for fuel at the T/A truck stop in Wytheville, and in less than an hour we arrived at Mayberry Campground in Mount Airy, North Carolina.  

Mount Airy is the hometown of television star Andy Griffith, and the picturesque town was the inspiration for the fictional town of Mayberry in the old Andy Griffith show.

Andy and his trusty deputy Barney Fife probably wouldn’t recognize the old town these days. It has a Wal-Mart Super Center, Staples Office Supply, Golden Corral Buffet, Lowes, and other major stores and restaurants.  Unfortunately, crime has come to Mayberry. The day before we arrived, a gunman killed four men in a shooting a few blocks from Main Street.

This is a beautiful area, with a lot to see and do, and we’ll be here a few days before we head on down the road. I’ll have a lot to share with you in tomorrow’s blog, so stay tuned. 

Thought For The Day – Never be afraid to try something new. Remember, amateurs built the ark, professionals built the Titanic.

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