Thursday 5-5-06: We “nested” today. Did some housekeeping first thing, then sat around and read the paper. I kept noticing things that could be reorganized to work better. We’ve got it feeling like home now.

Wiley packed us a nice lunch and we headed out to see Stratford Plantation, the house where Robert E. Lee was born. He didn’t grow up there, though; he grew up in Alexandria. The land (1500 acres) was originally bought by his father, Thomas, who built a fantastic mansion for his wife, Hannah. Robert’s brothers, Richard Henry Lee and Francis Lightfoot Lee, were Declaration of Independence signers. While we were going through the house, I was thinking about how tumultuous those times must have been. Just imagine having three sons who (in the eyes of many citizens) were committing treason! The two younger Lee brothers, Arthur and William, were diplomats. The house is amazing. There are eight chimneys, four on each end of the house. In Robert’s day, the two clusters of chimneys were connected by a platform. The family slept up there on hot summer nights, and sometimes even held dances. We ate our picnic lunch in the shade of some very large, old trees. I saw bluebirds, which I haven’t seen in many years.

Lucie, I thought of you today. The docent who gave us the tour was so knowledgeable about so many aspects of life in the 1700’s and the Lee family. The group we toured with was quite impressed. She was dressed like an indentured servant, and we all felt as though we’d traveled back in time. Daily life was so much more difficult then. She described how the cook and helpers spent 10-12 hours every day cooking in a room that could get so hot that there were little boys whose only job was to keep the hems of the women’s dresses wet so that they wouldn’t catch fire! They were responsible for feeding the very large Lee family and constant groups of guests every single day. Then, during harvest and planting time, they cooked for the field hands as well in order to free them for harvesting and planting. Imagine how much bread they had to make from scratch every day!

After lunch, we drove through the countryside to a little town right on Chesapeake Bay. The countryside is beautiful here. The azaleas and dogwood trees are in bloom. Also snowball bushes, forsythia and a tree with pale lavender clusters of blossoms which someone told us was called a “paloma” tree. I never heard of it before, but it’s lovely. Wiley hoped to do some fishing, but there was no access to the water. It was a beautiful drive, though. Lots and lots of history in this area! Westmoreland Park, where we’re staying, is situated between George Washington’s birthplace and Robert E. Lee’s! We did a little shopping instead. We wanted to build a little shelf over the sofa, both to have a place to sit a glass and also to keep Monkey from getting down behind the sofa and into the exterior storage space. We bought the materials at a little old fashioned hardware store, and Wiley installed it when we got back.

I called a few of my relatives who live in this area tonight, and it turns out there’s a surprise 80^th birthday party for my Aunt Dot. We’ve been invited to attend on Sunday. It’ll give me a chance to see my cousins that I haven’t seen in about 15 years. We’ll have to drive to Annapolis (about 3 hours), but at least we won’t have to take the camper.

Last night I set up some spreadsheets to help us track our expenses. We’ve budgeted $2100 for the trip up, and at least $500 of that is earmarked for gasoline. It’ll be pretty interesting to see what the trip costs us, and it will be helpful to know what to expect on future trips. We’re not particularly trying to economize—we’re rather frugal by nature—but I suspect we’ll be surprised by some of the ways money trickles out of our hands.

That’s it for tonight. Got to get my beauty sleep!