The list that ruled my life for at least one week

A mural of Luray in its younger days (founded in 1812). This was the ferry house.

A monument to the Civil War dead. 

Sunday, June 29, 2008

Wild tiger lilies are heavily scattered throughout the valley here. We’ve seen Kingfishers, Cardinals…

Today, my initial plan was to visit a Church in Luray. But, life was very slow for us back at the cabin, and I never got my act together. Later, I went into town with my brothers. We had a ball stalking Luray and pretending we were detectives of some sort. Then we had lunch at Uncle Bucks right on Main Street. Grand times. Anyway, we took photos of all sorts of things…as you can see.

I thought maybe this would be a good time to share the list of what we brought with us on this trip. We’ve been asked this question quite a bit so here you go. Before I begin, I must mention that before we left on our journey, Blackie Parlin gave me his copy of The Prairie Traveler: A Hand Guide for Overland Expeditions by Randolph B. Marcy. This book was written in the 1850s, and I loved pouring over the advice Marcy gave as I was thinking about this trip. Seriously. I wanted to bring it along. But, alas…Blackie, I’m sorry, your book didn’t make the final cut. It did have some good advice about what to feed your oxen and how many pairs of wool pants to bring though…sigh.

Packed in the back of the trunk:
1 tent, 1 sleeping bag, 1 sheet, 2 pillow cases, 1 camping hammer, 1 camp flashlight, 1 fishing rod and gear (this stuff is in the way back)

Swimming bag – 4 bathing suits, 2 pairs of goggles, 2 towels, suntan lotion

4 backpacks for each member of the family – 1 long shirt, 2 pairs of shorts, 5 short-sleeved shirts, 1 long-sleeved shirt, 1 pair of pajamas, 1 sweatshirt, 5 pairs of socks, 9 pairs of underwear

1 bag – 4 hats, 4 rain jackets, 4 pairs of sneakers (we’re also wearing the 4 pairs of sandles/tevas)

1 bag of games/activities for children

1 bag of Triple AAA maps and books

1 food bag – 4 plastic plates, 4 spoons, 4 forks, 4 knives, 4 cloth napkins, 4 bowls, 1 hotpot, 1 bag of 120 teabags, 2 coffee thermoses, 2 camelback bottles,

1 cooler – milk, apple juice, yoghurt, cheese, carrots, and so on…
1 cooler for water
1 backpack with portable DVD and book of DVDs (for emergency breakdowns…)
1 bottle of radiator coolant
1 picnic blanket
1 first aid kit
1 car kit bag – duct tape, jumper cables, etc.
1 laundry bag
1 medicine bag with toothbrushes and all that
1 backpack for each person with stuff that matters to them for the car

(back seat)
1 camera bag
1 computer bag
1 CD book and IPOD
1 backpack that has map of where we are now and books to read

I have to admit, I’m a bit nervous about tomorrow. Our trip truly begins – it’s just us. Yikes…

So, we traveled across the country with a friendly bearded lizard...(and other 7 year old dreams)

Ways to pass the day when you've got five children to entertain!

Loving the snakes and turtles and tarantulas and oh, yeah...that bearded lizard in the way back

CDC monkeys meeting the monkeys!

Saturday, June 28, 2008

Another day in Luray. The weekend brought more tourists to fill up the parking lots at Luray Caverns, but the Luray Zoo was quiet. I’m not sure why – I’m not a huge fan of zoos in general (animals in cages saddens me), but this one was quiet endearing. I think it is because Luray Zoo has stood the test of time to some extent – it’s 25 years old and some of its signs and decorations speak to that point. Also, it is first and foremost an animal rescue. Having said that, they also had a tiger, monkeys, and a camel. Probably not local finds…

We wandered around the zoo and the kids took great delight in the snakes and turtles. They also loved the petting zoo because they had the chance to get messy and feed and brush the animals there. The twenty people visiting the zoo sat together and watched a reptile show at 11:30. I took a photo of Miss Amanda, one of the zoo-keepers. She has been here for 5 years and is now studying biology and hoping to go into an occupation that has to do with taking care of exotic animals. Miss Amanda was a huge hit with the kids because she let them pet a bearded lizard and snake. She also talked up the fact that they would be good pets. Guess what I heard about from Alex for the rest of the day? Can you imagine bringing a bearded lizard along with us on this trip? Alex can…

Later that day Neil took the kids fishing in the Shenandoah River where they caught and released two fish. My day was less thrilling, but more relaxing. I went out to lunch with my sisters-in-law at the internet café. My Sister-in-law helped me out with a few more tricks on blogger.com. We’ll see what I can do (I’m still working on flicker, whoever you are gm, Mike, and Ranilla!).

Most importantly, we’ve really just been hanging out here and enjoying each other’s company. I’ve done a bit of reading about Luray, and I’ve taken some of Tom Ashburn’s advice about reading the local papers of the places we visit. Here we go –

Yesterday on the front page of the Luray, VA local paper, Page News and Courier we read these articles –

Few homebuyers shopping in buyers market: Real estate sales continue to slow in Page County, but process still rising?
$100,000 in damage: Two families displaced after strong winds, hail
IBR owner sought gun rights days before federal raid
Luray utility rates increase for second-straight year: With large, expensive projects underway, town expects rates to continue to rise
Former Luray dentist killed in Idaho accident

There you go.

Want to know about Luray? Read Chicken Soup for the Soul

Here is your helping!

Bank Street Used Book Store on Main Street in Luray, VA

Alex made this sign for the cabin! 

     Alex - hanging out on the porch!

The public library with an old granary in the background.

Flotsies!

CDC monkeys in VA!

June 27, 2008

Luray, Virginia. Today was slow as well…I’ll write a bit, but there is nothing that new to report.

We puttered around Luray and visited the public library and an adjacent playground for an hour or so. After the librarian’s good humor was used up on the four kids below the age of eight, we moved on to Flotsies. Flotsies is a portable ice-cream stand that came highly recommended and seemed to be the local thing to do. Flotsies was very busy at 2 PM on a Friday. Alex is continuing his new love affair with root beer – he shared a root beer float with his cousin. Bliss. Eleni went for soft-serve vanilla. You can see Flotsies below – and I took a photo for the CDC just next to it. Luray has some beautiful scenery with the mountains surrounding us here!

We drifted into a used bookstore on Main Street. One of my goals on the road is to visit thrift shops in every town (we might be able to guess a bit about the town by the things they get rid of? That, and they are just fun!). This bookstore can be our thrift shop in Luray since we haven’t found anything else comparable. Some noteworthy observations – In a tiny, one-room store, there were two and a half shelves of Chicken Soup for the Soul books, five shelves of Civil War books, two shelves of wild-west books, and two whole shelves of Native American books.

The rest of our day was spent hanging around – enjoying the scenery and the company. I’ll have more to say tomorrow as we’re visiting the Luray Zoo. Get excited!

In the meantime, Neil is taking a turn at writing! Now you will notice my mileage and addition mistakes! He’s going to carry that category for our trip, now…

Our ride (Neil):

We bought our first ever brand new car. This was a big deal for me, because I am spectacularly cheap by temperament (plus why would anyone drive a new car in crash-happy NJ?), but we needed something reliable and frugal for a trip of this duration. We went after a Prius, but so did everyone else this summer, and we couldn’t get one guaranteed to arrive in time. The next best solution, $8000 cheaper, proven technology, and probably a better driving experience, was a Honda Civic. We got a really good deal from Gary Liu at Planet Honda on Rte 22 in Union. We were in and out, with no haggling and histrionics, driving away in our new car, within three hours. The EPA mileage is 25/36, but we will test that out over the course of this trip. So far, we’ve been driving pretty slowly to conserve gas and protect the precious new car, so we should be able to exceed those figures. We got down here (320 miles) easily on one tank of gas. The car has side airbags, so it should be safe, even if light, and the trunk seems to hold all our gear pretty easily. It also has automatic transmission, which means readers of this blog should be spared daily venting sessions about driving stresses (if we had taken our manual Subaru for this trip). One of the motivations for this trip that is emerging is an experiment as to whether the Great American Road Trip is still viable in the new age of peaked oil. Many people consider us crazy huddled together in our small car for two months (“you’re not taking an RV???”), but my guess is that everyone is going to have to switch to smaller cars in the next few years, so we hope to show that it’s not such a major inconvenience (preaching?). We had to leave some luxuries behind (I’m worried about running out of novels), and we’ll be doing laundry every few days, but otherwise it’s good to be traveling light and leaving a modest footprint. I figure 7500 miles at $4 a gallon and a conservative estimate of 30mpg should cost us about $1000 for the round trip, which is much cheaper than four round-trip airfares, and we have the flexibility of always having a car, which is still vital in this country (otherwise, I’d have preferred to take the train). Perhaps Kirsti will persuade me to post again with updates on our wheels…

Bless her heart

Alex's first root beer (local VA!) with his cousins!

Fallen stalactite! 

Shaggy Dog - 7 million years old

The underwater lake

Alex and Eleni in the Shenandoah River

June 26, 2008

Here we are in Luray. It takes 2 minutes from our cabin to get to the Shenandoah River, 9 minutes to get to Luray Caverns, and 10 minutes to get into the historical town. In the course of 24 hours, we have visited all three.

Time slows down here. Maybe because it is family vacation time (my Mom, my step-father, my brothers, their spouses, their children – total 13), but I think it’s really because we are in Virginia. And, time really just slows down here. People ask you how you are doing here (and they really mean it). People let you get in the lane you want to get into because it’s just the polite thing to do. When you ask for directions, you might very well get the directions and the person’s entire life story.

We went swimming/wading in the river today and the kids tried to catch crayfish. Alex almost caught a catfish with his bare hands. Lunch and then down time and more down time. Around 2 PM, we headed into Luray and went to the reason most people come to Luray – the caverns.

Luray caverns were ‘discovered’ in 1878 (130th anniversary on August 3rd) by three men who were out hunting and felt a cool draft from a vent in a sink hole. At one point in the tour, our tour guide turned off the lights in the cavern to show us what those three men saw (or didn’t see – that was the point) as they searched around the caverns. I’m not sure I would have been so adventurous clambering down into the complete darkness with just one candle in my hand.

The best parts about the caverns:

Firstly, hands down, it was the temperature – 54 degrees (outside it was around 95 degrees)!

Secondly – another best thing was our tour guide’s accent. Jessica was around 20 years old and she sounded like she was a debutante straight of Gone with the Wind with one of those beautiful southern drawls. She was also blissfully positive. When we visited the memorial to Page County war dead at the last stop in the cavern, someone asked if any Page County military had died in the Gulf War or the current War in Iraq. Jessica didn’t seem to be aware that there was a war going on. Bless her heart (my sister-in-law from Virginia told me to add that. She said that you can say pretty much anything about anyone as long as you say “Bless her heart” afterwards. I’m not sure that is entirely true, but somehow, it sounds right here.).

Thirdly, yes, the caverns are pretty amazing.

In our hour-long tour we learned about the differences between a stalactite and a stalagmite and the fact that most of the cavern is made of iron oxide (rust) and calcite. Around thirty of us were shuffled in this dimly lit cave – together we descended to the lowest point of 167 feet under the earth’s surface. Alex and his cousins huddled close together and created all sorts of imaginary kid fears (Eleni was at the cabin taking a nap).

I’ve included some photos from inside the caverns. By far, the most impressive spots for me were the underwater lake – the 2,500 square-feet Dream Lake, the 170 ton fallen stalactite, and the translucent draperies. The kids liked Pluto’s Ghost and the great stalac-pipe organ (which played Mighty Fortress is our God on stalactites spanning 312 acres. seriously. I guess this made it into the Guinness Book of World Records even.).

And there you go.

Where is Bambi?

11 AM - in our driveway - on our way!

Leaving Madison!

  Bethlehem, PA

Lenhartsville, PA. You can buy live bait or hex signs here. We did neither. We just ate lunch across the street!

Eleni's pre-school lent us some monkeys to take on the road! Here they are in West Virginia! You can barely see them, but there are haystacks in the background.

June 25, 2008

Here we are on the road! Neil arrived home from China last night at 1:30 AM. We just left our house at 11 AM. It’s all happening…

Checking in with gas prices in Madison, New Jersey. 4.05 a gallon.

However, before the narration takes over, I should start with a preamble of sorts. We designed this trip with the purpose of fulfilling our life-long dreams of taking the great American road trip. For Neil, it appeals because of the books he has read and the movies he has seen. For me, this trip is meaningful because both my mother and father instilled their journeys into my consciousness. In 1957, my mother (age 10) took this trip while sitting in the backseat with her grandmother and brother. Her parents kept to a pre-planned 40-day schedule. In a very different style, my father retired from teaching in 1990, bought a truck, found a dog, and headed westward for 6 months. I believe his path was rather aimless. Our journey is a mixture of the two. We have some spots in mind and a few reservations, but mostly, we will be making this up as we go.

How to pull this trip together thematically? We originally planned to investigate the word freedom and all that it means historically, environmentally, anthropologically, and personally. So some of the routes and more lofty and academic places we explore are specifically tied to this Search for Freedom. However, the reality is that most of the roads and sites we visit may be purely for the fact that there are great playgrounds nearby…

For, of course, there is a bit of a challenge to all of this. Our children are 3 and 7. We’re in a small (yet so much trunk space!) car and we’re traveling for two full months. We have no recourse as our house is inhabited until August 24th. There is no real back up plan.

Some caveats for the reader to consider:

We thought it might be fun to take other people on this trip with us vicariously. So we’ve welcomed quite a crew to observe this trip via our blog. But, one of my shortcomings includes the fact that I’ve only visited 2 blogs so I’m not sure I have my head round what the etiquette is on a blog. If anyone wants to comment on this, go ahead. Perhaps it is best that I just write as I would anyway…we’ll see how it goes.

On that note, the only way that I can truly share this experience with such a wide audience (family, close friends, acquaintances, neighbors, Newark Academy faculty and staff, students, parents, alumni, Eleni’s child care center, Alex’s elementary school) is if I write as I would write in my journals. In my efforts to stay as genuine as possible in my writing and not give anyone the impression that I’m posing as a travel writer, I will write fairly quickly and play around with grammar as I usually do. If you have a poor stomach for imperfect writing, please do not read this blog. My goal is to capture the moments of the way we are today, not spend hours perfecting the script.

Finally, my muse. Who am I writing to? In my notebook journaling, I usually write for posterity; I write for a future me, I write for my children, and I write for the off chance that my journaling will be found useful (and does this have something to do with my history background?).

Here we are today…11 AM – 6 PM – 7 hours on the road – 450 miles

Route 287 South, 78 West, 81 South

Lunch stop in PA. Hex signs.

Rest stop in PA. 3 hours into the trip. I ask Eleni to drink her cup of water. Eleni - “I never talking to you again, Mommy.” Excellent start.

Route 81 Maryland. 4 hours into the trip and the kids are crazed. Neil asks, “Do you think it’s too late to turn around?”

Rest stop in West Virginia. 5 hours into the trip. It’s hard to make any anthropological observations yet about being outside of New Jersey. Highways and rest stops are somewhat universal on the east coast so far.

George Washington National Park, Virginia. We are slowly maneuvering the curves and hills of the road in the shadow of this gorgeous forest. For 5 minutes Eleni yelled for her favorite deer, “Bambi! Bambi, where are you? Come see me!” No, we did not find Bambi.

In a way, I cheated a bit by saying we begin our journey today. Unlike the rest of the trip, we have a definite destination: Luray, Virginia. We are meeting up with some of my family and we’ll be staying in a cabin in the woods for five days. We will be in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia.

Here we are. Photos are further below and not in order - I have not sorted this all out yet. But, the people at 58 West Cafe in Luray are kind.

Getting started

We begin our road trip on June 25th. The plan is to travel around the USA for two months in our small car with our small children. Stay tuned...