On the Road Again

One last chance to play with the Christmas toys before they were packed away in the car for the long trip home.


We left my mother's house this morning to start the trip homeward. Blaze really didn't want to leave and kept telling us how much he was going to miss Grandmother and Ula.

We stopped at one historical site today, The Trail of Tears memorial in Hopkinsville, Kentucky, but we were disappointed by the fact that the visitor's center in only open on Fridays and Saturdays (this is Tuesday).


The Trail of Tears was the forced relocation of Cherokee Indians by the U.S. government. The map above, shows the 1,200 miles they were forced to walk. Many people died along the way, and two of their chiefs are buried at the memorial in Hopkinsville.







We stopped for dinner tonight at the Smokehouse Buffet in Monteagle, Tennessee.
After dinner, Blaze saw a player piano work for the first time. I gave him a quarter to put in the slot and it played two very loud Christmas carols. He was thrilled!



Afterwards, he kept telling me that Santa Claus was going to bring me a player piano next year.

We're stopped for the night now in a motel near Chattanooga, Tennessee.

Hidden Treasures

Sunday, my mom took Ula, Blaze, and I on a day trip to French Lick and West Baden, Indiana.
Hidden away among tree covered, rocky hills are these two tiny towns, each with a huge, gilded, luxury hotel, where movie stars and presidents of a bygone era once came for "the cure". There were mineral springs located at both hotels and the water was even bottled and sold around the country.
The water from French Lick was bottled as "Pluto Water".


The spring is still there,





But people are no longer supposed to drink it because it was found to contain Lithium. That didn't stop one man we spoke to there, though. He had rigged up a glass measuring cup on a rope, so he could scoop out the water and drink it, much to the embarrassment of his teenage daughter.



This was the original spring:




This is the magnificent hotel located at French Lick, but I would consider this the lesser of the two hotels:





The hotel at West Baden boasted 4 springs and the biggest dome in the world at the time that it opened. The springs are no longer there, because it was a monastery for many years and the monks filled in the springs. It still has a very impressive dome, though. It has been renovated recently, back to the way it was in its glory days, and just opened to guests again a year ago.

Our Latest History Lesson

Saturday we drove over to Vincennes, Indiana to see the George Rogers Clark memorial. The visitor center has a good movie that explains the important role that George Rogers Clark and his group of "Kentucky Long Knives" played in the Revolutionary War. The monument is built on the site of Fort Sackville, a British-held fort that Clack and his men were able to take, even though they were greatly outnumbered.









We have been inside the monument before, but it's closed right now for repairs. One of the levees along the Wabash River broke recently and flooded the basement of the monument. The real damage, according to my uncle, occurred when workmen were trying to pump the water out and the basement walls collapsed. The ranger told us it would be opening again soon.

I found this picture online that shows the interior of the monument:


I also found out that Liberty's Kids has Revolutionary collectors cards, so here's George Rogers Clark:




The children throwing rocks into the Wabash on the Illinois side of the river:

Small Town Christmas

We did not get the white Christmas we had hoped for. As a matter of fact, it'd been unseasonably warm.

We have been able to spend lots of time out doors, though, seeing the local Christmas light displays and the historical sights that are near by.

The town of Palestine, Il. has one of those quaint, old fashion downtowns that looks like it is frozen in time, but it does have a library with free, unrestricted, wireless internet, which is how I am now typing.





Every year the park here is filled with lights and animated scenes for Christmas.

Christmas Day

In case anyone thought I was exaggerating the descriptions of just how nasty that motel room in Waynesboro was, I took a picture of the corner of Blaze's bed.



As much as I enjoyed Williamsburg and Monticello, after the car trouble and the motel, I was very happy to see Virginia in our rearview mirror.



I am very grateful to the mechanic in Waynesboro, who told us that he had to finish our car, because he wasn't going to let that little boy not see his grandmother for Christmas.

The car is running a bit rougher than it used to, and louder, but it's running, and we made it to my mom's house around 3 a.m. Christmas morning.

We didn't get much rest, but we did have a good Christmas. Ula, my oldest daughter was already at my mom's house, since she's spending her winter break from University with her grandmother, so we had a good size group looking at the presents in the stockings Christmas morning. Then, Christmas night, we had my uncle's family with us for a big dinner and the opening of more gifts.









DH and Ula both ended up wearing black turtle necks for Christmas dinner and they decided they looked like they were both part of some modern Shakespearean acting troupe.

Unplugged Challenge:Wrapping Paper

The Unplugged Challenge for this week was to make something out of used wrapping paper. My oldest daughter had a great idea, which was to make tissue paper flowers, but we are at my Mother's house and we don't have any pipe cleaners to use as stems. Instead, Blaze made a collage picture of a winter scene, using a big piece of silver wrapping paper as the base and gluing white tissue paper and pictures cut from wrapping paper onto it.





Blaze presenting his picture to grandmother as a gift:

Stranded in Waynesboro, Virginia

We toured Monticello yesterday morning.


This is the view of the house shown on the back of a nickel.





We didn't get far after leaving Monticello, though. We were in heavy traffic on route 64, when the car started acting like it wasn't in gear. It began losing power, until it stopped moving altogether. We ended up on the side of the road, between cars and trucks speeding by so fast that the force of their passing, rocked the car, and a double layer of high fencing on the passenger side of the car, to stop rock-slides from entering the road. It was bitterly cold outside and DH had to walk to get help because we don't own a cell phone. Blaze and I waited at the car and I mostly spent that time staring at the icicles hanging from the rocks on the other side of the fencing.
It turns out, we were very close to the Waynesboro exit. A man pulled over and let DH use his cell phone to call AAA for help and we were towed to a service station in Wayseboro, where they are now replacing our clutch.
We spent the night in a cheap, awful motel across the road from the mechanic's shop (that's why I still have internet access. These days, even motels with no mattress pads on the beds and dirty bathrooms, have internet).
We were supposed to arrive at my mother's house last night, so I called her to let her know what was going on, but she had trouble understanding what I was saying because the phone here is so bad. It is being held together with electrical tape.
The Mechanic says it will be a couple more hours before the car is fixed, but we should be back on the road later today.
We just keep telling ourselves that this stop has saved us from something worse. The weather in Illinois was so terrible yesterday that my mom said they had to close Interstate 70 due to ice.

Our Last Day in Williamsburg, Part 2

To pick up where I left off last night when my eyes became to tired to see the page any longer...

Blaze, like most of the boys there, was fascinated by the Williamsburg Powder Magazine, the place where the gun powder and guns were stored.







We then went to the DeWitt Wallace Decorative Arts Museum, which is entered by going through an eighteenth century insane asylum, the first hospital in North America to solely treat mental illness (DH has an interest in mental hospitals, because he did his Masters Thesis on Civil War era mental hospital cemeteries).

There were exhibits in the museum that caught Blaze's attention, too. There was a nice exhibit of children's toys.



I love this dollhouse size kitchen:




After the museum, we wandered through some shops and made it back to the historic area just in time for the Tavern illumination, which was good because by that time we were freezing and all the fires warmed us up nicely before the walk back to the car.







One of the taverns had this lovely example of the tin lanterns we were trying to make with our tin cans:



When we left Williamsburg, we drove for about two hours and spent the night in Charlottesville, so we can go see Thomas Jefferson's home, Monticello, before heading West. We have about a ten hour drive ahead of us today.

The weather report for Illinois, which is where we are going, doesn't look good. It says "ice pellets".

once we arrive in Illinois, I will be without internet for a couple of days, so I hope everyone has a wonderful holiday!

I will leave you with a picture of the prettiest Christmas tree I've seen this season, the Folk Art Tree from the Dewitt Museum: