Up in Vermont

After a great visit with daughter Lynn and family in Kent, Connecticut, where our son in law, John, did yeoman work helping with the fix of our emergency brake system, we headed north to Vermont.

Our first afternoon in Vermont, we were under a tornado watch. The sky turned black at 5:30 in the afternoon and hail the size of Kennedy half-dollars banged on the roof of our rig. It was so loud we could barely talk.

This all passed in half an hour and the sun popped back out. Very strange feeling. But the torrential rains returned later in the evening and we had horrendous lightning through the night.

We have already set to work, doing fixes on furniture at daughter Stephanie's home. Jo is baking banana bread. Stephanie and our two grandchildren head for Italy in eight weeks to join son in law Alex in Trento, up in the Dolomite Mountains of northern Italy.

Jo came down with what turned out to be shingles and we found an urgent care place in Colchester, VT, that treated her after the Memorial Day holiday. This painful immune-system illness has resulted in blisters that feel like tiny needles pricking her abdomen. Happily, there now is a drug for the treatment of shingles and she is on a week-long regimen of this. So we expect great things soon!

A Hail Storm.... in MAY!

Yes! We drove through the town of Kent, across Camp Flats Road through a rain storm (George Washington passed along this tiny road back in the good old days). As we climbed the hill, we saw long trails of white stuff along the road. I thought these were the downed blossoms of cottonwood trees. We pulled over and Jo opened the door. Hailstones. Millions of them the size of corn kernels. Welcome to Connecticut in late May. Summer is a month away.

We came north two weeks ago, stopping off outside Baltimore for a remarkable wool festival. I have never seen so many sheep breeds... all the way from Karachol (from the Mideast and Africa) to St. Kilda miniature sheep from a tiny island 'way west of Scotland's Outer Hebrides. There were Scottish black-face sheep who sported pretty impressive curling horns. And there were angora sheep that gave up their priceless fleece to the shearing every six months.

As we headed north from Baltimore, we calculated the best and cheapest places to stop to fill the gas tank. We stopped in New Jersey - always a cheaper place than New York or Connecticut. But we damaged the extending step at our side door when it jammed up against the curb at the filling island. We tied it up with a shock cord and then sailed across the George Washington Bridge into Manhattan. Now that was a tactical error. Sunday afternoons, you might think, traffic would be slow. Not so when we deal with Manhattan. We were trapped in stop-and-go traffic for two hours.

Our emergency brake red light began to warn me - again - that it was losing fluid - a fearsome warning in this no-lay-by highway through New York City. We made it out of the city and when I parked and squirmed under the rig, the fluid reservoir was empty. I topped it off again, cursing this awful piece of engineering.

We ordered replacement parts for the step and for the actuator on the emergency brake and I have managed to get the steps working again. Now, we await the rebuilding of the actuator to see if we can put this menace of a brake system to rest again. Then our plan is to drive north to Vermont to visit with our daughter, Stephanie, before she heads off to join her husband in Italy where he has taken a new job.

Leaving Today

The Governor's Palace is in the background as this carriage passes by in Williamsburg, VA.

American history and current events collided on Monday when Jo and I stepped back in time on a visit to Williamsburg, Virginia. There we were, walking on cobbled streets of earliest America. Outside on this perfectly balmy day the Twitters and news channels were dissecting the death of Osama bin Laden. It was a good day.

We crossed the bridge of time into Colonial Williamsburg. I liked the plaques embedded in the bridge, telling us with each step we passed through the building blocks of our own history:

"1776. You are a subject of King George"

"1790s. Your latest news is more than one week old"

"1865. You know people who own other people"

Colonial Williamsburg was brought to life in the 1920s when John D. Rockefeller provided the funds for a vision by a local minister who believed this old town could become a showcase for America's early history. They pulled it off.

Carriages, pulled by teams of horses, sauntered along the streets. Women with bustles and linen clothing stopped to talk with us about life in their town.
We stepped into the Governor's Palace, built in a show of power by the Brits. Lord Dunmore, the governor was not at home. But his entrance hall was pretty impressive. Hundreds of Scottish swords (Dunmore came from outside Glasgow in Scotland) were arrayed on the wooden walls. Several hundred muskets and pistols were arranged neatly to intimidate visitors.

A servant of his lordship, in character, walked us through the palace which took 14 years to build. He explained there was a party planned for the evening, hence the scurrying up and downstairs of the maids. I sidled up to the manservant and asked politely about the delicate state of King George's mental health back home in London. He was a little startled but recovered quickly. "His majesty has his good days and his bad days," he said. "We in the colonies feel he might live another three months." His majesty, as you probably know, went bonkers and had to be removed from the throne.

When we stopped by a carpenter working a spokeshave as he created cedar shingles, I wanted to know what he did with the mountain of shavings that piled in front of him. "Oh, we just throw it out. We have no real use for it," he said. I remarked that that seemed to be the very start of America's wasteful, throw-away culture and he smiled and said, "We have endless woods, sir. We will never run out." Yeah. Right.

In the smokehouse, we came upon a Negro slave who was pulling the sides of salted and smoked pigs out of the brick smokehouse. He explained the process of salting and then slow smoking that cured the meat. We were impressed with the almost lifelong storage of meat this permitted. But it also was a lesson in how important salt was in this process. That's where the tax on imported salt caused a hullabaloo among the Americans who still, at that time, thought of themselves as Englishmen.

Six hours of wandering through the town made me realize the huge improvement in my creaky back. A knitting friend of Jo's, back in Florida, had hooked me up with her husband, a doctor of osteopathy, who relieved my pains and freed up my muscles with his remarkable hammer. I call him "Ray the Hammer" because his incredible tool opened up my painful back muscles and gave me renewed hope of remaining functional. But it was more than the electronic hammer that he used on me. He also had the remarkable ability to lay his hands on my knotted muscles and feel the causes of my pain.

We ended the day outside the Raleigh Tavern on Duke of Gloucester Street. There we heard from a local newspaper publisher who was pushing the causes of independence for the colonies. The Virginians were not big fans of the Massachusetts terrorists, freedom fighters, insurgents (however you might wish to describe them). But they stood with them in protest over the import taxes demanded by England. They stood as one, men and women alike, by refusing to wear the finer cloth you could only buy from England. Instead, they began wearing clothing made from the coarser homespun cloth they could spin and weave on their own. It brought home to me, again, how history repeats itself. Gandhi did exactly the same thing when he taught Indians to give up the fine cloths of England and to spin their own cotton and weave their own cloth as part of his push for independence from the British Empire in the 1940s.

The next day, we rolled north to the outskirts of Washington and luxuriated in the welcoming warmth of old friends Richard and Jane in Fairfax Station.

Now we sit on our hill at Lake Fairfax County Park. Because we are a stone's throw from Washington, we are enjoying excellent television reception on a rainy day. This is the only city we have ever come through where it is possible to receive programs over the airwaves from Russia, Japan, China and even Al Jazeera English language TV.