Charlottesville and Williamsburg — Joe's Slideshow Archive

Page 5 of 5
Charlottesville, Virginia

And I told you to be patient and I told you to be fine and I told you to be balanced and I told you to be kind

One of the great achievements in American architecture and a UNESCO Cultural World Heritage Site, Monticello is the name of the estate and well known home designed by Thomas Jefferson, the only architect (so far) to have been elected as a US President. The building is certainly deserving of its status despite (or perhaps because of) some of its more crazy design flourishes. Beds are literally built into walls, the front entry has an 18th Century Jefferson designed clock that also tells you the correct day and the stone at the front entry is really faux painted wood. Also the building is organized over a service corridor that connects the kitchen to the slave quarters, yet again pointing out a flaw of character (or of the time, to be more generous) where the man who wrote the US Declaration of Independence felt the need to own other people. Apparently he did not see the "all men are created equal" truth as self evident after all.

Near(ish) to Charlottesville, Shenandoah National Park is one of the few eastern parks I had yet to visit and one I had always thought would be far more interesting than it was. Sure its pretty, sure there are mountains and repetitive overlook after repetitive overlook, but something about the park seems to be missing. Maybe it's Skyline Drive, the main road which cuts across the ridges and effortlessly takes you to all those overlooks. Each one is individually pretty but few (if any) are spectacular, and after a while even the pretty ones start to lose their interest. Everywhere you look there are trees, hills, trees, and, um, did I mention the trees?

Charlottesville is more than the home of Dave Matthews and the ghost of Thomas Jefferson, it is also home to Jefferson's other most famous building(s) at the University of Virginia. Similar in style but at a much grander, urban scale, the Jefferson portion of the campus is certainly far more interesting than any of the other buildings in downtown Charlottesville. Jefferson not only designed the building(s) but also founded the University and served as its first president. In fact Jefferson was so proud of this that he included it as one of three accomplishments on his tombstone in Monticello, with the other two referencing being the author of the Declaration of Independence and another about writing a Virginia state law guaranteeing freedom of religion. Nowhere on that stone does he mention the minor fact about being the nation's third president, you know the one responsible for the Louisiana Purchase and the one who still has the best monument in Washington. Maybe he knew something we don't.

I met up in Williamsburg with my sister, brother in law and two attention fueled nieces who were in Virginia at the time for a thoroughly separate reason. Colonial Williamsburg (if you haven't visited yet) looks exactly like a colonial city in the late 1700s that has been invaded and filled with people from the future. It's hard to get fully into the historic scene when you see people taking home videos or talking on their cellphones in front of the town blacksmith's demonstration. Still the place has its moments (I especially enjoyed the jail and the governor's palace grounds) and my brother in law (pictured below) helped things out by wearing a tri cornered hat throughout the hot, often grueling afternoon visit, despite the fact that the very shape of the hat seemed to somehow focus the sun's unforgiving rays right to the center of his head. Ouch.

In addition to Colonial Williamsburg, we also spent a far more fun day at Busch Gardens (not pictured below), a place where a single ride on the brand new super wide Griffon coaster can make the whole trip worth the trouble.

More of a ruin than a re-creation, the National Park Service site at Jamestown shows at every turn just how tough things were in Virginia 401 years ago- high mortality rates, disease, potentially angry locals and a legacy that still isn't nearly as popular as those damn Massachusetts pilgrim bastards with all their gimmicky thanksgiving propaganda shtick.

And on a totally unrelated note, before leaving Jamestown to drive back to Richmond and the airport, I checked my iPhone only to find out that my JetBlue flight back to Richmond had been canceled due to thunderstorm activity back home. Frantically I was able to book a flight for the next morning, find a hotel and extend the car rental. Later that afternoon I got another e-mail from JetBlue that the just rebooked morning flight had been canceled, so frantically I booked the next flight later that day and extended the car once again. The next morning I got a third e-mail letting me know that the just re-rebooked third flight was canceled as well. So iPhone in hand I canceled my JetBlue reservation and decided to angrily drive up I-95 all the way to JFK, wondering where all those plane grounding thunderstorms were as I drove back under dry skies to pick up my car at the long term parking lot in Queens, the whole time cursing the traffic and cursing the weather and cursing an airline that seemed all too quick to cancel flight after flight after flight. And while my minor inconvenience was nothing compared to the high mortality rates, disease and potentially angry locals that the first Jamestown residents had to deal with so long ago, at least they never had to deal with the torture of the drive up I-95 through rush hour traffic.