What is it about non-disposable stuff at hotel breakfasts? We cringed to use styrofoam plates, thin plastic juice cups, flimsy forks and knives, and garbage plastic coffee cups (pretty bad coffee too). But we got the requisite number of calories and some vitamins and then headed back up out of that dreary room. Luckily there was a cute baby in a stroller to divert our attention. There are tourists (and babies) everywhere!
SarahE still hadn't showed up, but she was in the room when I got up there and had been a little discombobulated herself. It was a strange place, and the strangest thing was the print hanging above the only acceptable coffee-maker around, the Keurig near the musty elevators. This was an example of displaced (or at least not understandable to us) allegiance to Confederate icons, and to militaristic music. The print was bordered by images of artifacts of 19th century military/country life: a confederate hat, gloves, a simple home, a brace of pistols, a covered bridge perhaps. It was captioned, "Onward Christian Soldiers." And the main image was of three named Confederate generals accompanied by a fawning colonel, riding horseback but pausing at the top of a rise and all smiling at each other like they were the happiest, most confident people in the world. One was Stonewall Jackson but I forget the other names.
I won't go on about the psychosis expressed by this picture, though I might. Let me just say that romantic individualism is not well expressed by military uniforms, or portraits of a group of leaders. People will disagree and that's fine, but I found the print strangely offensive. Might make another great t-shirt!
But though the day had started off strangely, I was pretty excited about our plan. We were going to see Harper's Ferry,which I'd heard a lot of good things about, and then end up in the metropolis of Washington that night. Jim and I were delayed at the coffee-maker by one of those people who went on about how great Harper's Ferry was, though he got more and more of his facts wrong the more he spoke. But as I say, this wasn't the place to discuss politics or call another person's "facts" into question.
Checked out, loaded up, and the day was actually beginning to look promising by the time we waved goodbye to the Ramada and Hangouts. Back to Interstate 81 North to the same exit in Winchester that we had approached from the North back on Sunday, and East on Route 7, then North on Route 340 (the aforementioned main road through the valley) in Berryville.
This was another great time to see the countryside, in the Northwestern-most part of Virginia and the extreme Eastern-most part of West Virginia. There were still some corn and soybean fields, but also some horse farms, some auto repair shops, and some groceries. There were also lots of "lower middle-class" houses, as there had been in the Shenandoah Valley proper, one-story cinder-block structures with perfect, huge lawns. There were a few scattered post offices and city halls, and lots and lots of churches, all Christian. It was beautiful in its own way, expressing pride in communities and well-lived lives.
Harper's Ferry is a very small town at the confluence of the Shenandoah (which had joined with its South Fork by then) and Potomac Rivers, located in West Virginia with Maryland across the bluffs to the North and Virginia just over the cliffs to the South. There's a National Historical Park there, but one of the wonderful things about it is its place in the geography of America, not just that it's been preserved. We need to cherish crossroads like this, they tell the story of our land.
This was also the key location in John Brown's aborted slave rebellion, one of the key events presaging the Civil War. But luckily we weren't swamped by history that day, it was all about seeing this great confluence of early America.
From Route 340 we could sense the crotch in the mountains ahead, and barely see the Shenandoah River off to our right. We turned into the NHP parking lot and flashed the Senior Pass again to the happy Ranger. Big parking lot there, this must be a high-attendance Park in the Summer. We looked at the diorama in the VC, hit the comfort station, and strategized.
Harper's Ferry offers three main themes: historical, commercial, and natural. I've mentioned the historical and natural, but the commercial is very important. We stumbled on a graveyard commemorating the first (European) settler, Robert Harper, who saw the potential in the place but established a town of only 4 people. Lewis and Clark later used it as their jumping-off place for their early-19th century expeditions. The Chesapeake and Ohio Canal and the railroad were built up the Potomac from the Washington DC area in the mid-19th and that's when the town was at its height. There was also a canal that extended up the Shenandoah, though I have no idea how far it got. The C&O and the railroad continued up the Potomac and then jumped over to the Ohio in lower Pennsylvania and so opened up the West to early America.
We decided to hike it and go for the natural theme. Unfortunately, Route 340 crossed the rivers right below where we were hiking and highway noise was omnipresent! But this was a fine hike, down the bluff to the Shenandoah, down the floodplain of the river (where we saw a turtle), which featured the last mile of the same railroad we'd seen in Winchester last Sunday. Where Route 340 crossed the trail we switchbacked to the North back up the bluff and joined the AT, which of course went through this important crossroads.
We followed the AT into town, past the old graveyard I mentioned, and stumbled on an Eastern box turtle that was trying to cross the trail as quickly as possible but was terrified by us.
The key feature here was Jefferson's Rock, which overlooked the confluence just a hundred yards or so before the trail dove downhill into the town. We'd heard a lot about Jefferson lately, and were not impressed by another place named after him. But I have to quote him at length here, as he expresses the wonder I try to express often in this blog:
"The passage of the Patowmac through the Blue Ridge is perhaps one of the most stupendous scenes in Nature. You stand on a very high point of land. On your right comes up the Shenandoah, having ranged along the foot of the mountain a hundred miles to seek a vent. On your left approaches the Patowmac in quest of a passage also. In the moment of their junction they rush together against the mountain, rend it asunder and pass off to the sea. The first glance of this scene hurries our senses into the opinion that this earth has been created in time, that the mountains were formed first, that the rivers began to flow afterwards, that in this place particularly they have been so dammed up by the Blue Ridge of mountains as to have formed an ocean which filled the whole valley; that, continuing to rise, they have at last broken over at this spot and have torn the mountain down from its summit to its base. The piles of rock on each hand, but particularly on the Shenandoah, the evident marks of their disruptions and avulsions from their beds by the most powerful agents in nature, corroborate the impression.
"But the distant finishing which nature has given the picture is of a very different character. It is a true contrast to the former. It is as placid and delightful as that is wild and tremendous. For the mountains being cloven asunder, she presents to your eye, through the cleft, a small catch of smooth blue horizon, at an infinite distance in that plain country, inviting you, as it were, from the riot and tumult roaring around to pass through the breach and participate in the calm below. Here the eye ultimately composes itself; and that way, too, the road happens actually to lead. You cross the Patowmac above the junction, pass along its side through the base of the mountain for three miles, the terrible precipice hanging in fragments over you, and within about 20 miles reach Frederictown and the fine country around that. This scene is worth a voyage across the Atlantic."
Well ok, this is what we saw and he describes it well. The rivers came together in a powerful, majestic way, under the railroad bridge we (and the AT) walked along, and pointed East to Washington and the sea. When we crossed the bridge to the Maryland side, we climbed down to see the (well preserved) ruins of the C&O Canal and Lock 33 as it rose uphill towards Ohio. There were many bikers and hikers and joggers along the Canal path and we joined them for a bit. Don't know if they went all the way to DC, though for a day's bike excursion that'd be doable.
We came down the hill from the AT, past the old Catholic Church (Irish and other immigrants built the railroads in the US), and toured some historic streets, then went over the railroad bridge as described. Many people had put padlocks on the bridge as symbols of love, though perhaps of a frightening variety, especially when you felt compelled to place the padlock in a dangerous spot.
I can't get over, in retrospect, what good weather we had! What had started off as an overcast, rainy day had turned into another glorious blue day with lots of sunshine (and lots of heat). We started looking for a place to eat lunch and the Amtrak from the West came hooting into town, then hurried on its way down the River after a few people got off and on.
The Ranger at the downtown VC gave me a great local map and list of restaurants, and we decided to seek out the Almost Heaven Pub & Grill (even though Jim had been confused with John Denver in the past), where we got a great table on their upstairs patio. The buildings were cheek by jowl in downtown Harper's Ferry, as you might expect for such an old town. SarahE and I got Seneca Ales (as we found out the next day, the Seneca tribe had extended that far South) and I had a fine turkey club.
Have I mentioned how hot it was on our whole trip? I had soaked through my t-shirt a few hours ago and was probably very ripe by the time we ate lunch, though no one mentioned it. There was not much breeze that afternoon, but it was maybe because of the location of Harper's Ferry, sunk into the bottom of sets of cliffs. Whatever, we were not about to walk back up the hill from downtown, and instead took the shuttle bus back to the VC at the entrance, where we had left the car. Let me say that downtown Harper's Ferry is as magical a historical place as I've seen, and I encourage everyone to visit there. This is a beautiful, significant spot.
The shuttle bus dumped us back at the VC, where we hit the bathrooms and then found the car. SarahP needed a Post Office and so we detoured into the "real" area of Harper's Ferry, as opposed to the tourist area. There were lots of signs there about Rockwool.
Got back on the road and followed Route 340 over the Shenandoah bridge to the Loudon Heights and then back over the Potomac bridge to the Maryland side. We soon found ourselves in Frederick MD, and transferred over to Interstate 270, Southeast to Washington.
Yikes! It was only mid-afternoon on a Friday by then and traffic had already started to get intense. The other side of 270 was gridlock, even as far North as Frederick. And our GPS (we were using Google Maps on my phone) started making dire predictions, which only intensified as we got closer to Washington.
As predicted, the Beltway (Interstate 495) was pretty bad, though it had been a relative breeze getting there. But soon after we crossed the Potomac counter-clockwise on the Beltway over to the Virginia side, we exited onto the George Washington Parkway and it wasn't too bad getting down to Arlington.
I'd been stunned when booking hotels to get one in Arlington, within a 25-minute walk of the Lincoln Memorial, for a very decent price. The ones in DC itself cost multiples of this place, and I was sure it'd be sleazy, but all reviews and pictures assured me it was exactly what you'd expect, a tired and non-elegant but still very serviceable hotel, crowded into a corner of the Rosslyn district of Arlington VA. This was the Red Lion and though Sarah encountered a rat in the smoking area and Jim encountered a (dead) cockroach in his room, and we were lucky to get a free space in their parking lot, this was a beyond-acceptable motel. At least they didn't have any weird Confederate paintings there.
We hauled the heavy suitcases up to the second floor (no elevator??) and I realized we were just about out of beer! That was enough to rouse me, even after a long drive, and the useful documentation they'd given us at the front desk told me about a nearby Safeway. I got SarahP and Jim to come along and made a pretty successful excursion. This inner city supermarket experience let us know pretty quickly that we weren't in Strasburg any longer.
Back to the hotel and where to eat dinner? We theoretically had thousands of choices (we were near the Metro), but basically limited ourselves to the "high street" we had seen in Rosslyn, Wilson Boulevard. There were many choices there but we settled on Guajillo; Jim and SarahP wanted another Mexican restaurant since they're so rare in London.
And this was exquisite food. SarahE had a braised pork shoulder that I tried some of and can still taste. I got the pulled pork and it was delightfully seasoned, and was a huge pile of meat. Jim asked me what mole poblano was and I advised against it, so of course he got a chicken mole poblano (SarahE recommended it) and the only thing he could complain about was that the chicken was a little overcooked.
Fine dinner and luckily it was downhill back to the Red Lion on Arlington Boulevard (Route 50). And the Red Sox opened their divisional series against the Yankees that evening! I actually stayed up to watch all of it, a nail-biting game that the Red Sox eventually won. After that, right to bed. Washington tomorrow!
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