Wednesday, September 16, 2015

Sometimes you just need a map...


When we left Jean and Paul's, our intention was to stop at and visit Valley Forge on the way to NJ where we would see both Don's older sons. We directed our faithful GPS to lead us there and after driving past signs that said Valley Forge National Historic Park we found ourselves in a parking lot that appeared to be WAY FAR AWAY from any sites we knew we should be seeing.  AND, to make matters worse, the direction we knew we needed to go was clearly marked with a No Entry/One Way sign.  So, we continued in the direction we'd been going and ugh! We were in town, in our huge RV towing the car and the GPS (because I was inadvisably using Google Maps on my phone rather than our SPECIAL FOR RVs one!) sent us up little residential streets on hills with sharp curves. We made it back around but still could not find the right place.  I called the Visitor's Center and the woman there gave me long complicated directions which sounded even harder.  Bagging any idea of getting RV, car and us to the Visitor's Center, we returned to the original parking lot and unhitched the car, loaded Phoenix into it and set off to find it.  Find it we finally did and it was not easy.  Apparently, the NPS cannot put their signage on certain roads (at least that is what we were told) so we had seen one sign but the next logical place could not be used.  In any case, by the time we got to the Visitor's Center and found the 1/2 hour film we would have liked to see was not being shown for another 1.5 hours, we decided to skip the cool and orderly display inside so we could drive around in the heat.

We saw the site of an encampment and then visited the Washington Memorial Chapel and by then it was getting late.  We did not want to hit rush hour traffic in NJ and so we gave up.  A pretty much dud of a visit. The chapel was pretty though and there are online resources.







One of the most poignant memorials is that of a mother crying at the grave of her child killed in war

Even with all of our mis-routing it was a beautiful drive along the springtime roads

Our drive to NJ was pretty and we saw lots of farms...YES...there are farms in NJ!

Crossing the Delaware River
albeit it in spring, on a bridge and in an RV rather than freezing in a boat...
into NJ

Farmland








1 comment:

  1. There's a reason that New Jersey is called the Garden State.

    ReplyDelete

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