Big news of this weekend: DC was hit with a pretty major snowstorm. According to the New York Times: "A blizzard that had forecasters reaching for superlatives engulfed the nation’s capital and the mid-Atlantic states on Saturday with record snowfalls that paralyzed transportation, commerce and all but emergency services."
We missed the storm, actually. On Friday morning, we headed up to Valley Forge with our Washington Seminar group. We stayed at a dorm-style facility owned by the Freedoms Foundation, which basically felt like "We love America" summer camp. Our room was in the General Mac Arthur building. Behind the dorms was a fifty-two acre "Living Memorial" to Congressional Medal of Honor Recipients. Supposedly, there is an acre for each state plus the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico. I'm no surveyor, but the plots for each state didn't look even close to an acre to me. The weather was cold and the memorial was pretty dreary and we were hungry, but it was kind of interesting.
After lunch at the Freedoms Foundation--where they like to mix their world cuisine--we went on a three-hour bus tour of Valley Forge. This is Jason with a cabin. General Washington's troops stayed in little huts similar to these, although our tour guide was quick to point out that these cabins were 1970s-era replicas and not original buildings.
Me with a field. There are many fields at Valley Forge; in fact, aside from the house where General Washington stayed while he was here and a forge/stable building, the whole park is one big field.
Look, it's a revolutionary! Oh wait, it's just Jason modeling Continental Army gear.
We stopped at the George Washington chapel. This is looking up the carillon bell tower. The church had beautiful stained glass windows inside. I'm not sure how many people attend regular services there, since it's in the middle of nowhere, but our guide says it is still used.
After a tasty dinner of tacos and tortellini (I was serious about that mixing of food genres thing), we listened to a lecture from a Thomas Jefferson impersonator (although according to his website, he is a "first-person interpreter"). He did a good job and it was pretty interesting. We had some ice cream and went to bed.
We were awakened early in the morning by a snow plow. The group was supposed to leave at 8:00 a.m. for Philadelphia, so we had breakfast at 7:00 a.m. However, it had snowed a lot during the night, making our departure impossible.
We finally left at 2:00 p.m., when the snow stopped and the Valley Forge National Park road was semi-cleared. This is right before we left.
Look how high the snow is!
It took us 2 hours to get to Valley Forge and 6 hours to get home. We were stopped on the freeway for probably 45 minutes or so, and had to keep circling the city and getting on different roads because lots of the highways were impassable. When we finally got back to the Barlow Center, we had approximately 2 feet of snow.
This is the street outside our house. Plows have been going by for the past few hours, but it is still pretty deep. We are lucky, though; there are apparently 200,000 people without power.
Well, that's our adventure. We don't have church tomorrow again, and may not have work on Monday (Jason's birthday)! Now we're just exhausted.
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