Ehmann Family: Cray cray for National Parks sites

With more time at our disposal than any year before or likely after, we decided to extend our usual trip to Virginia-Maryland by driving down and back, visiting many of the National Park sites along the route.

Before we left, Caroline created a treasure hunt out of her Junior Ranger badge and patch collection. Check out her rhymes for "cannon" and "music"

The only NP site in Connecticut is Weir Farm, and boy is it a stinker to visit. Ever heard of American Impressionist painter J. Alden Weir? Well, this is his studio, which in the first half of the 20th century hosted other American artists that you have never heard of. The Junior Ranger activity required a walk through mosquito-infested woods to sketch Weir's scuzzy pond, and Erin came out with her legs painted in red splotches.

If we come back to do the other 2 activities, we can earn a patch and a pin

Morristown, New Jersey, now this is a solid National Park site. It's got replicas of the wooden huts where the Continental Army spent one of the terrible winters of the Revolutionary War. It also has a large museum of George Washington artifacts.

Shoes, swords, and even one of his pianos are on display

We broke down and bought a couple of Founding Father bobbleheads. Erin got bobblehead Alex and Caroline bobblehead George.

Edison's workshop in West Orange, NJ was absolutely amazing

even if its surroundings were rather unsettling

Edison's office had lots of artifacts, like this cubic foot block of copper, which was a gift from the copper industry in recognition of electric lighting

There were three floors of the laboratory to explore with all of the original machinery. As the girls remarked, it smelled like a dirty old factory

This building is where the first motion pictures were made

Next stop, in an equally unsavory section of New Jersey, was Paterson Great Falls, where in the 1792 none other than Alexander Hamilton established the first US industrial complex, employing the power of the Passaic river

Apparently Paterson has the second highest waterfall east of the Mississippi

With ice cream sandwiches in our belly, we moved on from Paterson...

... to Edgar Allen Poe's scary house in a scary part Philadelphia

Having read Poe's story about the black cat, we enjoyed the spooky dark basement. There were several holes in the walls, but thankfully no corpses were to be found.

We arrived at Independence Hall in torrential rain

and this is as close as we got to the Liberty Bell

Hopewell Furnace: one of those off-the-beaten-path gems

We learned how charcoal was made in the 1700s to power early iron smelting

in giant stone chimneys

and then carted off to the nearest waterway for transport

Erin was spooked by the creaky old waterwheel, since it reminded her of the one that impaled Saruman in the Two Towers

More fun with General George, now at Valley Forge, PA

We were surprised to learn that 2 Loseys were soldiers at Valley Forge

Now we're on our way back north, and if it's a cannon it must be a civil war site. Monocacy battlefield in Maryland, where a third advance into Union territory was stopped in 1864

Nice kepi and haversack, Caroline. Also, the girls learned firsthand how uncomfortable wool must have been in the summer. Dave just finished a book about the history of cotton and also is thankful for that wonder fiber. Imagine if your only options for underwear cloth were wool, linen, or silk!

(Not shown is Harper's Ferry NHP, because we didn't want to take the required trolley ride from the visitor center to the historic town. Instead we did a drive-by of the John Brown sites and will save the full visit for another time) The battlefield at Antietam was simple to tour and full of memorials to all the fallen men.