Six Things, part 3

Vacations
Being an enlisted family, we've never vacationed much, but, being an enlisted family, we've moved around every few years, and have taken advantage of the moves by visiting fun and interesting places along the way, and by making short side-trips when we've lived in exotic locations, like Upstate New York. ;-)

Fort Stanwix

Baseball Hall of Fame

Niagara Falls

Fort William Henry

USS Constitution and the USS Constitution Museum

Plimouth Plantation and the Mayflower II

Fort Toulouse, where we saw a mock battle modeled after the battles of the French and Indian War

King's Mountain National Military Park

Shot Tower Historical State Park

Hm. An awful lot of those are military history places. Imagine that.


My favorite place to visit, and one I'd love to go back to, was the Frontier Culture Museum of Virginia, which we first visited while moving from Valdosta, GA, to Rome, NY, in the summer of 1994. "The Museum currently features six permanent, outdoor exhibits comprised of original farm buildings from Britain, Germany, and Virginia. These buildings have been carefully documented, dismantled, transported to Virginia, and restored." Pictured here is a farmhouse from Ulster, Ireland. When we visited, a kind woman was sitting by the front door of this cottage doing her needle work. She showed us the lace she was knitting on tiny wooden needles that had been carved by her husband, and she asked our eldest daughter, who was five at the time, how old she was. On hearing her age, the woman told her that if she'd been living on this farm two hundred years before, by five years of age she would have been responsible for knitting all the family socks. Fascinated by this, Elai wanted to learn how to knit. Looking back on it, the most useful thing I learned from the trip is how little meaningful work there is for small children to do when you buy everything you need ready-made. We're finally (mercy, it's been twelve years now!) learning to knit and crochet some things, most notably hats and dishrags, but I'd like to add socks to our repertoire.