Ned here again. Our focus today was all about Thomas Jefferson at Monticello. We drove through some beautiful Virginia countryside on our way to Jefferson’s home. On arriving there, we were impressed to see a beautiful visitor center which had opened about a year ago. We were a little anxious about whether we would get tickets to tour the house interior, since the place, on a Thursday morning, seemed to be crawling with large groups of school children. However, we were pleased to get a tour time about 1 hour later than our arrival time. This gave us a chance to take the plantation tour which covered the work and life of the slaves on Jefferson’s property. Our tour guide was a very enthusiastic former geologist, Ed, who was very knowledgeable about lots of interesting details of individual slaves lives, who he knew by name. Our house tour was given by another very well-informed fellow, who dressed in a tie and sports coat, despite the warm weather. One of my favorite highlights of the tour was the wound clock in the large entry room over the front door. The cannon ball-sized weights which power the clock are supposed to indicate the day of the week as they descend the wall. The problem, however, as our guide put it, was that “the 7-day clock was mounted on a 5 ½ day wall”. A whole had to be cut into the floor so that the weights could drop into the basement of the building on Friday and Saturday, before they were rewound back to the ceiling on Sunday morning. We also liked the design of the interior shutters on the windows, which folded back in a very elegant manner. Some other highlights: excellent use of skylights for good natural light, clever dumbwaiter and revolving shelf designs in the dining room to reduce the waiting staff to one person, and the famous double-pen invention which allowed Jefferson to make a copy of every letter he wrote. The grounds of the building are very nicely maintained and landscaped. (Today’s pic is a nice exterior shot of the house.) We enjoyed a walk from the house back down to the visitor center where we watched a very good short film on Jefferson. After Monticello, we made a slight detour to Fredericksburg to sample the ice cream made at Carl’s. We had seen this store featured on a TV show about great ice cream stores. While we thought the ice cream was very creamy, both the chocolate and strawberry (which I bought in the name of science) were served too warm and sloppy. Debi’s vanilla was a good consistency, but we didn’t think either the chocolate or vanilla were particularly well flavored. So, despite the wonderful original-looking 1950’s exterior or the place, and the very impressive vintage freezers from which the product was served, we had to rate Carl’s as number four, so far, behind Blue Bell, Doumar’s and Farr’s. From there we maneuvered through the rush hour traffic surrounding both Washington D.C. and Baltimore, in order to find our current campground in a beautiful state park, which is strangely located in the middle of a very urban area. Tomorrow we’ll try to hit two of Debi’s childhood homes in both Wilmington, Delaware, and Ramsey, New Jersey. She can hardly wait!
