50 States: Virginia (5)

April 28th, 2008 · No Comments

50 States: Virginia

I can’t say if Virginia was really next in line in my earliest days of travel, but our 1981 trip to Washington, D.C. and Williamsburg was a pretty formative experience, so I’ll go with it. I was six, and fully obsessed with the American Revolution, the Civil War, and anything that flew, so Colonial Williamsburg, the battlefield at Manassas, and the Air & Space Museum were right up my alley. My memories of Virginia from that time are a little vague – visiting the Torpedo Factory in Alexandria (loved that t-shirt), buying too many faux-parchment reproductions of various important documents at various gift shops, and watching men in period costume making rifles at a gunsmith’s shop in Williamsburg.

Flash-forward to the summer of 1997, when George and I took off on our road trip after college graduation, and spent our first night on the road with Scott, who was in architecture grad school in Charlottesville. Eleven years later, he’s still in Charlottesville, if only for a few more weeks, with his wife and daughter, and all together, they’ve collectively re-defined Virginia to me. Rather than a place for a history vacation, Virginia is now pretty much just Charlottesville, in my mind, where I’ve visited a eight or ten times over the last ten years or so, a place to get together with family, walk the Downtown Mall, and have a bagel at Bodo’s. Our Charlottesville days are coming to a close as Scott, Sarah, and Camden prepare to move, and Tim and Mari get ready to take off as well, but who knows, maybe we’ll be back one day…

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