Two Trips

The main reason I am so far behind on writing here is that I’ve taken a couple of semi-local trips, each about a three hour drive away, this month.

Shenandoah Valley: The first trip was to the Shenandoah Valley the first weekend of the month. I drove out to Clifton Forge (a bit west of Lexington, VA) on Saturday, November 5th for the first Allegheny Highlands Storytelling Festival. The drive wasn’t too bad, even though I still hate I-81, which tends to have too many big, slow-moving trucks. Also, there were some rain showers off and on. The festival itself was worth going to, especially as it had been way too long since I’d seen Kim Weitkamp (who was headlining, along with Donna Washington). There were also a few regional tellers performing. It was, in general, quite entertaining. There was a story swap, too, which I emceed. Fortunately, everyone pretty much stuck to the time limit and I didn’t have to strong-arm anyone off the stage.

I stayed overnight at the Travelodge in Low Moor, about 4 miles away, which was adequate. There was heavier the rain the next morning, when the Virginia Storytelling Alliance annual meeting (including brunch) was held. If the weather had been better, I would have walked over to the Coffee Mill Museum to check that out. Maybe next year, since it looks like this festival will happen again. Fortunately the rain had let up by the time that was over.

I drove up to Staunton to see the Woodrow Wilson Presidential Library and Museum. The $15 admission fee includes the museum and a guided tour of Wilson’s birthplace. My feelings about Wilson are complicated. I admire his intellectual abilities and think he has the primary responsibility for bringing the U.S. onto the world stage. But he had some repugnant positions, particularly regarding race. The museum displays have some level of apologistic tendencies there, but I can agree to some extent that he was a person of his time and place.

Anyway, the highlight of the museum is his car (a his 1919 Pierce-Arrow limousine.



Other exhibits include an underground reproduction of World War I trenches, Wilson’s office at Princeton, a number of displays about the times of his presidential terms (e.g. a lot of material re: women’s suffrage). I’d say it’s worth an hour or so.

The house tour really has more to do with his parents than with the President himself, since his family only lived there for 2 years and he was born during that time.



The tour guide did not seem particularly knowledgeable. For example, when I asked where they had moved there from, she didn’t know. (It turns out that Wilson’s father had been a professor at Hamden-Sydney College, which is roughly between Lynchburg and Richmond, before becoming the minister of the Presbyterian Church in Staunton). And there was a room with musical instruments (a guitar and piano) and she didn’t know if he played any instruments, though his mother and one sister were very musical. I’d say it was worth a stop, but as much because downtown Staunton is a pleasant place for a stroll than for its own merits as a museum.

I spent the night in Harrisonburg. The next morning, I went to Shenandoah National Park. I’d been to a little bit of the park before, but only briefly. Going early in the day was wise, as there were few cars on Skyline Drive. Also, this finally gave me a chance to get a lifetime Senior Pass for the National Park system. The weather was excellent, though a bit windy in a few places. I stopped at several overlooks and went to the visitor center, including hiking a couple of trails from there. It would have been prettier a few weeks earlier, but the fall foliage was pretty much gone. Here, have some pictures anyway.











I spent about 5 hours total at the park, at the end of which things had gotten more crowded. It’s only an hour and a half away, so I really have no excuse for not going there more.

Ocean City Knitting Retreat: A while back I saw an ad for a knitting week somewhere but the schedule didn’t work. It prompted me to do some googling and I found a retreat in Ocean City. Maryland the week before Thanksgiving. The hotel price was very good and it seemed to be a pretty informal thing - mostly time to sit around and work on projects and chit chat.

The drive was reasonably pleasant, except for the first mile or so from my house to the Beltway, which crawled due to construction. I’d gotten a later start than I’d hoped to, so I didn’t really have time to stop at any of the historic towns on the Eastern Shore. It would certainly be intriguing to spend a week or so driving around them, though, particularly some of the sites associated with Harriet Tubman.

Anyway, I had no issues finding the hotel. When I got up to my room, I saw this lovely view of the Atlantic. Alas, it was rather too cold and windy to enjoy sitting out on the balcony.



I found the ballroom where the retreat was and soon found that things were sort of weird. There were only a couple of other knitters there, while there were about 20 scrapbookers hard at work in most of the room. Oddly, there was another, (unrelated) scrapbooking event going on in the adjacent ballroom. Anyway, I had a bunch of yarn to get rid of (mostly from a friend who had been clearing out her stash of novelty yarn) and I put that out on the flea market table. Then I set out to spend some time knitting and crocheting and talking with the few knitters. I spent most of my time working on a Tunisian crochet afghan. In fact, I worked the same few inches of it twice, because I’d screwed up the edges the first time and had to frog it. A few more people arrived for various periods of time over the next few days. There were also a couple of people selling nice yarns, one of whom I would have bought from but she had only one skein of the colorway I liked.

I did take some time to walk around a bit of the town, which is really dead by mid-November. Walking on the boardwalk is a mixed experience - pleasantly uncrowded, but cold and windy for the most part. (I had brought enough warm clothing to make it reasonably enjoyable.) Still, I think Octoberish would be a better time to go to Ocean City - past peak crowds, but with more places open. I don’t feel the need to go back to this event in the future.

On the plus side, I won a very good door prize - $50 in gift cards for Joann.

And, as I said, I did have a nice view. Here, have a sunrise photo.

Five Questions Meme

These questions are from mallorys_camera. If you want me to give you some questions, please comment. But note that I may not have time to reply until about December 9th or 10th.

1. You're a storyteller. And a scientist. How do you define "truth"? 😀 I am an engineer, not a scientist. That affects this answer, because one of the most important principles of engineering is that it doesn’t matter whether or not something is correct as long as it works. So, for example, most mechanical engineers are perfectly free to ignore, say, any physics beyond Newtonian mechanics.

From the storytelling standpoint, my usual tagline is that all of my stories are true, whether or not they happened that way. There are emotional truths that go beyond facts. I feel perfectly free to fill in some details I don’t actually remember if I can get a good laugh out of them and they make emotional sense within the story context.

2. Do you like to dress up? I love to dress up, I have a few dressy dresses, at least two of which still fit me. The catch is having appropriate events for them. I do have one dress-up party I go to pretty much every year, except that it was virtual for two years and I had a schedule conflict this year. I may have to revive the concept of Black Tie Miniature Golf.

3. Who did you feel closer to when you were growing up, your mother or your father? And why? Or did you feel equally close to both? That’s a tough question. I had a rather turbulent relationship with my father, but that is largely because I am a lot like him. He was definitely an imposing and opinionated man. Also, I feel that I knew my mother a lot better, largely because she had a large family and lots of pictures of family and friends from her childhood, which she would show us frequently. My father, being a Shoah survivor had few living relatives (and, except for his father, the only ones he was close to lived in Israel). So I guess it is pretty much a tie.

4. What's your favorite museum? There are many museums I could choose, starting with the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, the Peabody-Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts, and the British Museum. There is a wonderful museum in Pretoria, South Africa (I think it is the African Window Cultural History Museum) which has the unique feature of having a section where they ask a local group to curate an exhibit out of items in their permanent collection, so you can get a perspective on what items are important from the standpoint of, say, a luncheon club in a nearby village.

But let me go with a museum I could probably spend an entire month in without getting tired of it. The Musical Instrument Museum in Phoenix, Arizona is absolutely amazing, with demonstrations and concerts as part of their exhibits. I was there on their opening day and it was a good thing that it wasn’t completed yet because I had limited time.

5. Of the many, many places you've traveled, about which ones did you think, "I could live here”? There are several, though many don’t really meet my bigger criteria for somewhere to live, often due to a lack of a suitable Jewish community. In the U.S., the two paces where I found myself looking at real estate ads were Charleston, South Carolina (which does have what I consider a reasonable Jewish presence, but suffers from political neanderthalism in the state) and Traverse City, Michigan (which has nothing Jewish and is way too far from a major airport, but is beautiful). The only other place in the Western Hemisphere I could really imagine living in is Montevideo, Uruguay, though I’d have to improve my Spanish considerably. There are a few places in Europe I could live in. London is one, but I think my top choice in Europe would be any of several Italian cities, especially Bologna, though Venice, Rome, or Capri would also do just fine. Other places that are appealing for various reasons are Cape Town, South Africa and Perth, Australia (or, possibly, Melbourne, but I need to go back there to reinvestigate it). Oddly, as much as I have enjoyed traveling in Asia, I can’t think of anywhere there I would actually want to live. But I suppose my overall top choice would be Israel, except that Tel Aviv is too expensive and the retirement community near Haifa I’d want to move to has an incredibly long waiting list and I’d be unlikely to get a spot there before I was 80.