Part Ten – Vacations of the Mid 60’s to northeastern U.S.

          The following year, 1964, was the year that Paul’s Key Club held an international convention in New York so we drove him and a friend there. We stopped to visit Baha’is in Hamburg, N.Y. but didn’t stay. We went through the Grand Canyon of Pennsylvania on route and arrived in New York over the George Washington Bridge. We dropped Paul and his friend off and we stayed with a young couple in Westbury, Long Island whom we had met at Durst’s early that year. While there Joan & I visited the United Nations Building and also the World’s Fair at Flushing Meadows were LaGuardia airport in now. After the convention we picked the boys up at Grand Central Station and returned home via the Holland Tunnel. Driving in Manhattan was a traffic nightmare and we were glad to get away.

          The next year, 1965, we went on a trip with Geoff. We stopped off on the way and visited Larry in Cobourg (we had visited Larry more than once while he was in the juvenile detention center and took him out on trips into town or out to Shelter Valley near Brighton). We camped overnight in Presqu’isle Provincial Park and the next day crossed the Ivy Lea Bridge, stopping at the visitor center in the middle of the St. Lawrence River. We crossed New York State through Lake Placid to Fort Ticonderoga, which we toured. We crossed Lake Champlain into Vermont and went south to the American Revolution battle site at Bennington. From there we crossed New Hampshire and up the coast to Kittery in Maine. We went to Greenacre Baha’i School; it was before the summer season began and we stayed there and in return Joan and I painted one of the bathrooms and Geoff painted the library. We visited the room where Abdu’l-Baha stayed back in 1912 when he was in America.

          Leaving there we went south into Massachusetts, but we didn’t go into Boston, but headed west through Lexington and Concord. I remember driving down the road between the two towns, with Geoff’s head out the window shouting “the British are coming!” In Concord we saw the bridge where the Colonists defeated the British army and the Minuteman statue. Concord is also the home of Emerson, the American essayist.

          We came into New York state through some beautiful country and visited the battlefield at Saratoga where Benedict Arnold lost his leg and the British army coming down from Montreal was defeated. Then we went to Fort George at the foot of Lake Champlain which has been restored. Then we visited Cooperstown and toured the Baseball Hall of Fame and where James Fennimore Cooper, after whose father the town was named, lived and wrote his famous novels. On our way home we passed the Howe Caverns and decided to stop and make a tour of the caves. From there we drove north to Geneva on Seneca Lake. From there we crossed into Canada at Niagara Falls and returned home.

          Next year we took Larry on a trip south. We first stopped at Perryville in Ohio, the most northerly point that the Confederates invaded the north. It was here that Gen. Bragg was defeated by Gen. Buell. We crossed the Ohio River at Cincinatti and spent a couple of days in Kentucky. We toured some of the horse farms around Lexington and saw the grave and statue of Man of War, who won the Kentucky Derby several times. We visited Frankfurt and saw the graves of Daniel Boone and his wife.

          Then we visited Boonesboro, a restored pioneer village and then the Cumberland Map where Boone crossed the Adirondacks into Kentucky. We could see four states from the lookout at the top of the pass. We then entered Tennessee and stopped at the Norris Dam, one of the first big projects of the Tennessee Valley Authority. From there to Oak Ridge of the Atomic Energy Commission, where the atomic bomb was first developed and Larry received a radioactive dime, and had his hair stand up on end.

          We stopped just outside Chattanooga and the next day we visited a model display of the Chattanooga battle sites, which was quite realistic. We went up to the top of Lookout Mountain, site of the “Battle in the Clouds” and while up there toured the peak including Lovers Leap, which overlooks the city and the state of Georgia. We then made a quick tour of the battle site at Chickamauga, before finding a motel.

          The next day we followed the railway down through Dalton and Rexica where the great railway chase took place. We went to the site of the battle of Kemesou Mountain just outside Atlanta which we bypassed and went to Stone Mountain where a statue of Jefferson Davis, Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson was being carved. They had a miniature railway which traveled around the mountain, a distance of about a mile, and it reenacted the locomotive chase with rebel soldiers attempting to board the train and some cars on side lines on fire.

          We headed from there back to the Smokey Mountains and followed the Blue Ridge Parkway until we got into Virginia. We first went to Monticello at Charlottesville, the home of Thomas Jefferson, the picture of which is on the American nickel.. Then we went to Appomattox Court House where the final surrender of the Civil War took place between Lee and Grant. Then on to Richmond.

          We got a motel just south of Richmond where we stayed a couple of days. We toured the sites of the seven battles around Richmond from Mechanicsville to Frasers Farm. All of this area is set aside as a National Battlefield Site. We toured the next day the battlefields around Petersburg, a siege that lasted for months.

          While in the Richmond area we visited the James Peninsula where we went to Yorkstown where the American Revolution ended and Williamsburg, a restored colonial town, as well as Jamestown, a recreation of the original English settlement.

          We then went north following the Virginia battles in reverse chronological order through Spottsylvania Court House and the Wilderness to Chancellorsville where Stonewall Jackson was killed. Then we went to Fredericksburg, a city largely dominated by civil war sites and where the Chamber of Commerce gave us a complimentary parking pass for the day.

          From Fredericksburg we went north to Manassas where the two battles of Bull Run were fought. We stayed at Centreville for two nights and one day we went into Washington where we visited the Lincoln Memorial, the White House and the Capital. We also crossed the river to Arlington Cemetery where we saw President Kennedy’s grave and the Iwo Jima Memorial.

          From there we went to Harper’s Ferry, West Virginia where John Brown staged his famous raid on the arsenal there, one of the events leading up to the Civil War.. Then on to Antietam, the bloodiest battlefield of the war. Then up into Pennsylvania to Gettysburg where we followed the course of the three-day battle, and where Lincoln delivered his famous address.

          On our way home we visited the grave of General Braddock, the English general who was ambushed by the French and Indians on his way to Fort Pitt. Then Fort Necessity, a British fort in the area of Fort Pitt which was where Washington was stationed when he was still a lieutenant. Our last stop was at Sandusky, Ohio, where we were going to go to Put-in-Bay, after which the naval battle of Lake Erie was named after the War of 1812, but we didn’t go when we learned what it would cost.

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