It is 11:09 pm and we've been in the car for around 8 hours today, but I'm still going to pound out some bloggage about our trip before I crash for the night.
Let's start with yesterday - our full day in Virginia's capital, as well as the Confederacy's capital, of Richmond. We ventured downtown to the Museum of the Confederacy and White House of the Confederacy to start our day. The biggest complaint about these two items is the parking (well, actually I think it is the celebration of the Confederacy, so the second biggest), and it is valid. After driving a few blocks away to secure a meter space, we entered a celebration of all things rebel. Except slavery.
The museum is very good, but, frankly, it was mostly overlap from our previous stops. The Gettysburg museum covers most of the battle history we got in Richmond. I really enjoyed the top & bottom floors that covered Civil War & soldier life. I never knew the Confederates used dolls to smuggle drugs or exactly what a Sherman necktie looked like. It is a very nice museum with enough Confederate battle flags to make you a little uncomfortable.
Next we toured the White House. It has been restored to look as much like the original as possible which looked more impressive than it actually was. Everything was fake - the walls looked marble, but it was really just fancy wallpaper. Everything was like that. I'm not going to lie - I liked it. Why shell out for real marble when the wallpaper looks close enough?
Jefferson Davis is handled with kid gloves here. Apparently I have been wrong to call him a micro-manager; he was a work-a-holic. He is credited with being largely responsible for building up the great Union army he must now defeat. There is little mention of how nobody really liked him. I guess it isn't really the place for it. At one point, a know-it-all in the tour group questioned our guide about how he knew the story he was telling us was true and the guide buried her with multiple reasons. BOOM. I ask my guys to ask those kind of questions, but you really look like a jerk when you ask them.
We grabbed lunch and then visited the graves of several prominent Civil War (Jefferson Davis, Fitzhugh Lee, George Pickett & JEB Stuart) and American (James Monroe & John Tyler) heroes at the Hollywood Cemetery. Very odd to be a tourist in a cemetery, but we weren't the only ones.
We ended the day with some Krispy Kremes and a minor league baseball game with the Richmond Flying Squirrels. It makes me a little sad the Braves moved their AAA team to Gwinnett (where is that?) after so many years in Richmond. The stadium here is a dump, but man do they love their Flying Squirrels. I'd say 1 of 3 people there were decked out in Squirrels gear, including our favorite "Squirrels Gone Wild" shirts on the cute Richmond girls.
We rolled out of bed this morning and visited Petersburg on our way to Charleston. The most underrated and pleasant surprise of the trip: Petersburg. The movie was pretty bad - it reminded me of the WWII movies that Frank Capra did. I kept waiting for the narrator to talk about the Nat-sis trying to scale the earthworks of Fort Steadman. And the museum itself wasn't worth the five minutes it took to get around it. But...
Petersburg was the birth of modern warfare with both sides digging trenches and shooting at one another instead of lining up and charging. The earthworks at Petersburg are remarkable. You really get a feel for what it was like in the "trenches" (they didn't call them that yet). Then you drive a bit further and see the full thing with spikes, mortars, etc. Knowing what we know now about trench warfare in WWI, this was a horrible turn of events in terms of warfare. Yes, war got worse. It could go on FOREVER at this point. How do you win a war when you cannot attack your opponent?
The next stop was The Crater where the Union successfully dug a tunnel underground and blew a hole in the CSA trench, then unsuccessfully capitalized on that explosion by charging into instead of around the new "crater." I am so fascinated by this whole episode I bought a book and knocked out 70 pages on the drive out the park. How did they dig a tunnel while also fighting trench warfare? How did they know where to stop? Why did they charge into the hole? What was Ambrose Burnside doing there? I love The Crater.
We left for Charleston and drove through a typhoon in South Carolina to get here. Ryan and I both played it cool while it was happening, but both later admitted we were a bit worried. It was nasty.
We are on the 14th floor of our Holiday Inn and have a nice view of the river opposite the Charleston Peninsula. We went out to the Charleston Crab Shack and I got a plate of crab legs, so I'm a happy blogger tonight.
Fort Sumter, the Confederate submarine, The Citadel and then hopefully some Charleston site-seeing tomorrow.
CC
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