The Trip Begins

We're traveling. We will be gone a long time.  People want to know what we're up to.  It seems right to try to write a little bit about our experience, but I've already figured out that finding time to write will be more difficult than I thought,  unless we have rainy days in a place we've already seen and nothing else we need to do.  An organizing principle is that in each place we are trying to figure out what people like to do, and what they like to eat, and try it out a little bit.  We both like beer, so we are trying to drink local craft beer when we can.  It would take far too long to describe everything we see and hear, so I will try to just capture a bit from what we have seen.  I can see already that I need to write more often or just make it shorter.


Some highlights so far:

We spent a couple of nights in Richmond with a friend of Bob's from college, such a long time ago. Almost 50 years!  Jim was one of the first African Americans to be allowed to attend UVA law school. (Apparently before that, Virginia paid the tuition of qualified black students to go to school somewhere else. Sheesh.) He later became an appellate court judge, and he had a lot of interesting stories about Virginia's history, and Richmond's in particular.  He worked as a civil rights attorney on a lot of the desegregation cases in that state.  One of the more interesting stories he told us was about the late 50's when there was a law that said the Governor of VA took oversight of any school district that was desegregating; the Governor then made the decision for Prince George County that rather than have them desegregate, there would be no school at all there... for SIX YEARS. All the schools were just closed.  Jim wasn't affected because his school was all Black; so not only did school continue, but he had great teachers, who had been trained at schools like Columbia, Yale and so on. They couldn't get other jobs so they came home to teach. His French teacher had been to the Sorbonne.  He said it was a strange time in this way; he was getting what was actually a great education, while many white students (and of course many other students) were getting no school at all. He said there is a whole generation of people from that part of the state who just stopped going to school at that point, and never went back.  Jim gave us a wonderful tour of Richmond, neighborhood by neighborhood. It was so interesting.

While we were staying there we went to Colonial Williamsburg. It was fascinating, but unfortunately it was cold and rainy and didn't show us its most charming self. While we were there we had dinner with someone I worked with in Concord a long time ago and hadn't seen in more than twenty years.

We took a very long drive down the Outer Banks of North Carolina. It was wild and beautiful and empty, and almost everything was closed down for the winter. It felt like an adventure to take the car with our trailer attached to it on two different ferries to keep going south.

We actually started sleeping in the trailer for the first time when we got to Charleston, because finally as we are getting farther south it is not quite so cold. It has still been in the 30's here overnight, so we're lookig forward to some more 'open air' sleeping, and eating outside, farther on down the road.