Cross-posting from LiveJournal, 6 January 2015: Winter break in the South

So we set off on the morning of Christmas eve, heading south. Since our previous trip to Durham, NC, had been a very traumatic traffic jam, we decided to avoid the I-95 as much as possible and instead start properly with a visit to an 18th century plantation, Thomas Jefferson's Monticello (on the previous weekend, we prepared mentally by watching Gone With The Wind. A and S had no idea what to expect, and enjoyed it - although one of their comments about The South was that nobody had accents like in GWTW. Understandable, considering the actors ). Monticello is at the top of a hill, and was shrouded in mist, so we basically ignored the grounds. We took a guided tour of the first storey, which was very interesting. Jefferson designed the house himself, and there were all kinds of gadgets and great ideas there - like a revolving book stand that could hold five books. I wish every research library had that as standard issue on the desk, it would be really useful! The octagonal rooms with beds and closets in recessed niches were also very space saving. In addition to the exhibits of furniture in the main part of the house, there was an exhibition with interpretation of the slave quarters. Apparently skilled slaves were able to earn money by selling the labour of their free time - whether this was made objects, tailoring or produce from their gardens - to the Jefferson family or from getting tips from guests. I had no idea that this practice existed. We walked back from the house down to the visitor centre, stopping at the family burial plot, still in use, on the way. There was lots of the same names repeating themselves, and a headstone that has been waiting for over thirty years for a widow to be buried beside her husband.

We arrived in Durham only half an hour later than our expected time, rather than the three hours of our previous trip. However, this time our traumatic experience was totally losing internet connection after leaving Monticello, getting lost in a place called Chase City because the GPS on my phone is not sufficiently accurate, and only resuming connection with the outside world just before reaching Durham. We had noticed that whenever we were in rural Virginia we landed to lose connection on returning to the car after a hike, and SG explained to us why this was: our provider, T-Mobile, simply didn't cover Virginia, the Carolinas and Tennessee outside the interstates and large cities! Well, at least we know what's happening now, and can prepare for it. On Christmas day we went for a toddler-friendly hike, and then to see a movie and eat Far Eastern food. The movie was Big Hero Six, which was very enjoyable but apparently has very little connection to the comics, and the Far Eastern food was not Chinese, as is more traditional, but a Japanese hibachi grill, where the (Indonesian) chef puts on a performance of grilling the (mediocre) food.

Next day we truly set off for the unknown, driving almost due west towards the Smoky Mountains and Tennessee. ADC prepared a "Southern playlist" of over three hours for us to listen to, without any actual country music, apart from a few Robbie Robinson songs (although The Band is probably more rock than country). We noticed the differences between the original and Joan Baez renderings of "The Night The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down," and suddenly the lyrics made much more sense - of course it would be Sherman's cavalry, and not Stonewall Jackson's, that tore up the train tracks around Richmond (see more on that below). We headed for Asheville, a place that we had not previously been aware of, but highly recommended by ADC's cousin. This turned out to be a lovely little town that had not undergone development due to a the city's lack of money in the 60s and 70s, thus preserving a lot of Gilded Age and Art Deco building (a similar process occurred in Savannah), from the period when the town was an artistic centre with lots of sanatoria. We took a self-guided walking tour, which was included a pamphlet with details, and also additional signage, explaining, for example, that this was the house in which O. Henry had stayed during his rest cure there, and that the building opposite had previously been owned by a Jewish tailor who became famous for sponsoring scholarships to the local college for boys from poor families, not sending bills during the Depression and so on. We also bought fudge there.

We reached Chattanooga on Friday night, and stayed in a hotel off the I-75, which was convenient for getting supper when exhausted, since it was in the middle of a strip mall. Next day we had breakfast at a Waffle Shack, where the boys were very happy to eat a large waffle and bacon. It was due to rain, so we went as quickly as possible to the Tennessee Valley Railway Museum, to catch the first tourist train. I had been expecting a steam train, but even a vintage diesel train is good. While we were waiting for the train to set off, we saw a freight train coming down the currently used tracks, with some ZIM containers. At the time, ADC thought that the train freight must be coming from the Gulf of Mexico, but in Savannah, when we realised that that is the biggest port on the East Coast, it seemed more likely that the train was on its way to or from Savannah. The train trip was about 20 minutes in either direction, and seeing the engine being turned around was definitely a highlight. After the train, we went to the Chattanooga Aquarium, one of the biggest in the South, which has two sections - River World and Ocean World. We decided to start at River World, and go to Ocean World if we had time/energy to do so, since we had not been to a fresh water aquarium before. The River World was extremely well done, showing the journey of the Tennessee River from the Smoky Mountains, where there are cold fast flowing streams, and ending in the sluggish warm waters of the Mississipi Delta, and all the animal, plant and economic life along its banks. As well as some very big fish indeed, there was a section with birds and otters, several species of snakes and on the entrance floor, a really beautiful special exhibition on sea horses (not fresh water aquaria, in this case!). We all enjoyed it very much, and we have clearly infected the children with the idea that you go through a museum slowly, reading everything there is to read and looking at everything there is to look at, as by the time we finished River World, there was neither time nor energy to visit Ocean World. We did spend another half an hour or so walking along the river banks, where we saw a touristy paddle boat, and read signs about Chattanooga's role in the Civil War. At one place, we saw the excavated remains of an iron furnace, the biggest and most technologically advanced in the antebellum South, which broke down in the winter of 1861/2, and was never used again.

That evening we ate the meal that was, for ADC and the boys, the culinary highlight of our trip: barbecued ribs at Famous Dave's, across the I-75 from our hotel. This being a Saturday night, we had to wait for a while before getting a table, but it was worth the wait. There were six different barbecue sauces on the table, a long menu of different kinds of meat and some interesting sides, including pineapple steaks, which I enjoyed very much. A was particularly happy, as both broccoli and asparagus featured as side dishes; Shas expanded his in-depth study of cheeseburgers to an equally in-depth study of mashed potatoes, which can usually be substituted for fries.

Sunday was our longest day of driving, following in Sherman's footsteps from Chattanooga to Savannah. On the way, we took a short break at Warner Robins Museum of Aviation in central Georgia. As we got out of the car there, we  realised we were in a different climate zone: it was much warmer and more humid than it had been in the mountains. Georgia seems to be like Tel Aviv in the winter, and now I understand why "the snow was deep in Virginia" was so significant to Scarlett's beaux - they were used to something very different. Warner Robins Airforce Base is one of the biggest bases in the US, but the aviation museum there is not the main one: the Air Force has another, larger one in Patterson, Ohio. I talked briefly to the volunteer who was explaining about the museum's layout and handing out maps and a list of the aircraft on view, and he was thrilled to know that a family from Israel was visiting his museum. He had previously worked in DC himself, and said that the Patterson museum was not too far away, just about eight hours driving, something you could do on a weekend. The museum itself was quite different from both the IAF museum at Hatzerim and Duxford. Even though many of the same wars appear both there and at Duxford, the American point of view is quite different, with much more emphasis on the Pacific theatre in WWII, naturally, and of course the post-WWII wars were different. More than that, unlike Hatzerim and Duxford, which both seem to have the attitude "if you're here already, you're interested, here's the plane," at Warner Robins all the major planes had little diorama-like additions of either pilots or parachutists or mechanics, presumably to bring the exhibit to life for laypeople. We didn't have time to do the museum justice, skipping entire sections so that we could spend more time looking at actual planes. I will say that I would have preferred the opposite, but it is true that the exhibitions can be seen elsewhere in one way or another, while there is nothing like the impact of standing close to a jet fighter.

We reached Savannah before sundown, but the weather was so grey that it made very little difference. After checking in at our hotel - no longer in a strip mall, but on the edge of historic Savannah - we went down to the river and wandered around, soaking up atmosphere before having supper. This was the fanciest restaurant of our trip, and in the end, the most disappointing. We left feeling that we had eaten well (I was very happy to have the opportunity to try collard greens, normally prepared with bacon, as they had a vegetarian option), but paid too much for what we had actually got. A major conclusion of this trip is that chains are not necessarily the devil's own work in America, so long as you are careful not to go to the absolutely plasticky places like Chik-Fil-A.

The highlight of the trip for me was our full day in Savannah. It was quite warm, but grey and drizzly: reasonable weather for walking around in, if  you have a good raincoat, which we all did. ADC had found an app for self-guided walking tours of Savannah, and laid out a route by combining sites from a number of tours, which according to the app should have taken us past something like 11 sites in 3 hours. Of course, it took us much longer than that, especially since as soon as we walked out of the hotel, I saw a sign for the market place and suggested going there first thing. It took us nearly two hours to get out. We stopped and sampled a sweet shop, a cookie shop, a salt shop and an art gallery specialising in local talent. We bought something at every place (actually, we left sweets and cookies for the evening, coming back before we went out for supper). We then meandered through the squares for which Savannah is famous, all of which have extensive plaques explaining the significance of the site, its name, famous people, etc. We also went into a bookshop and a peanut shop. Sadly, the peanuts were from Virginia, not from Georgia, so we refrained from buying even more food-related souvenirs. We saw the synagogue of the oldest Reform community in the South, which we thought was a church until we noticed the magen David, and Google Maps insisted that this was the right location, the fountain where the opening scene of Forrest Gump takes place, and visited a smelling garden, which was not doing so well, as it is winter, after all. And every single lamp post or bit of fence in the squares was decorated with red Christmas ribbon, and every tree was festooned (that really is the only word for it) with Spanish moss. We had a lovely, relaxing day, and if we ever have another sabbatical in the US, I think we could do worse than spending it in Savannah. I should go and read Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, as it is supposed to be THE book about Savannah (I had always confused it with The Garden of the Finzi-Continis, thinking that that was the name of the movie based on the book Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, but these are clearly two very different books and films).

From Savannah we started heading home. We spent the Tuesday basically driving through South Carolina and most of North Carolina, stopping at a nondescript town called Dunn, of which we saw only our hotel and a steakhouse (both on the I-85, not in the town proper), simply because driving all the way to Virginia was too far. We broke up the day by stopping at a nature reserve, Congaree National Park, which contains the largest tract of old growth hardwoods in the eastern US. This was another very different landscape: a swamp, where part of the boardwalk we had planned to use was washed out, requiring us to walk partly on very muddy paths. I did not have the right shoes, but both my boots and I survived. It was very quiet and beautiful there, with a few centimetres making a great difference in the ground coverage: bald cypresses poking up from muck were replaced by reeds as soon as the drainage improved. Going to and from Congaree was a glimpse into the backyard of America: trailer parks and little towns that time seemed to have forgotten, set among cotton fields. It was quite cold and there was nobody outside, so it was hard to know whether the people living in these rather depressing-looking places were black or white; some of them had a taste for Christmas kitsch the like of which we last saw when we were living in Cambridge.

On our last full day before heading home, we had planned to visit Petersburg Battle Site, which is actually a complex of sites, seeing as there was a thirty-mile front involved here; truly a dress rehearsal for WWI, this was the last line of defences before Richmond itself fell and the Confederacy dissolved. Like Chattanooga, this was a major railway junction, and Grant basically cut Richmond's supply lines by besieging Petersburg. We arrived to discover that we only had a couple of hours before the site closed early for New Year's Eve, at three rather than five, so we only got to see the Western Front site, which is where a company of Pennsylvania miners serving as engineers were able to dig a tunnel into the Southern trenches, undetected, and blew a hole into Petersburg's defences. Unfortunately, the Union soldiers were not properly informed of the plan, and rushed into the subsequent crater rather than around it, snatching defeat from the jaws of victory (a very common occurrence on the Union side, we learned from Ken Burns' documentary, but less so for Grant). Among other things, we saw a reconstructed hut that four ordinary soldiers would have shared, about the size of the bathroom in Kfar Saba without the service balcony where the washing machine is. This impressed the boys very much, especially when Ariel pointed out how much better this was than being in a tent.

Our final stop was in Richmond, where we spent New Year's Eve and the morning of New Year's Day. It was very cold and a bit of a disappointment, really. There was no public First Night celebration the way there is in New York and Boston, apparently, and the first few restaurants we called were all fully booked. We stayed at a lovely historic inn, Linden Row, in the historic centre, so eventually we just walked out and looked for somewhere that was open. We found a very nice restaurant, that did New American cuisine, and I had my best meal of the trip. A and S were less enthusiastic. Anyway, we wandered around a bit after that and then just went back to the hotel because it was so cold. We played a rousing game of Citadels, and the boys stayed up till midnight. I was in the shower at the time, and did not manage to prevent them from waking ADC up when they counted down the last minute of 2014 ...

Next day, we once again wandered around a historic downtown, following something called the Richmond Liberty Trail. This is not like the Boston Freedom Trail, which is a path on the actual pavement, with lots of plaques, but a blue marker every few metres that indicates whether to continue straight or turn. Any plaques along the way are those that have already been set up, and not connected to the trail, as far as I could see. Everything was closed of course, but we had a look at the Confederate White House, now in the middle of a hospital complex. It is much smaller than the real White House, and somehow seems symbolic of a kind of parasitism that the Confederacy had vis-à-vis the Union. I wonder if I only feel that way because they lost? If the war had ended with a negotiated peace and the CSA still existed alongside the USA, I imagine their executive mansion would look less like a pale shadow of the real thing. What was very interesting was the Richmond Slave Trail, which connects to the Liberty Trail. This does have a lot of plaques, which are updated regularly, for example with new information following the excavation of the site of a hotel/slave auction site/jail now underneath the I-95 and a parking lot. It's very strange to see how a dig for 200 years ago is regarded as digging up a distant past; in Israel anything like that is salvage archaeology, no university digs up anything so late, because we can go back 3000 years so easily. It is much easier to do 3D computer generated reconstructions when you have insurance blueprints and daguerrotypes of the original buildings, though! We started walking back to the car, which we had parked outside the hotel as parking was free on New Year's Day, after we reached the Reconciliation Statue, copies of which stand in Liverpool and Benin, in memory of and apology for the triangular trade across the Atlantic. I had not realised before to what extent Richmond was a major centre of the slave trade: 40 thousand Africans arrived here annually before the British navy outlawed slaving.

Once again, we were not able to find a restaurant for lunch, so we decided to start home earlier than planned and eat on the I-95, which we did successfully. We will come back to Richmond, it's close enough that it can be a day trip, and now we have to start thinking about our visit to New York on January 17-20. Despite a less than great last day, all in all we had a wonderful time, and I think we made excellent use of the winter break.