Saturday, September 5, 2009

Ye Olde America

We've spent the last week in the Lehigh Valley,stationed in Allentown, PA. It's been a long time since I was wow'd by a sense of history while in the US, but driving around the countryside lately has felt like being dropped in a History Channel documentary. All the buildings are smaller, and wooden, with little doors and low ceilings. The landscape itself is positively colonial, with short, close-fitted, rolling hills that look like they could come straight out of a Revolutionary War movie. The other day we sold at a college that was established in 1742 - for a person intimately familiar with large land-grant universities founded in the 1880s, the idea of a US university dating to before the Constitution is pretty damn exciting.

4 comments:

Jana said...

WE were sailing in the sunset, literally. on the sunfish it was gorgeous. when can you come to fl?
you can stay for free we'll give you posters from the eighties and nineties-a little ragged.
Aunt Joanne and Uncle Jim

KOSTIS KOURELIS said...

You aren't by any chance passing through Franklin and Marshall at Lancaster

Anonymous said...

Like the Turtles returning to the sands of their birth, your genes are calling out to you from the ancestors. Remember that you have true blood ties to the land you are rolling over. Your paternal great great great..grandfather probably walked those lands when he fought in the Revolutionary War those many long years ago. That, of course, makes you truly entitled to call yourself a Daughter of the Revolution.

Too heavy, I know. Michael O'Hair is buried in Kentucky so wave when you roll by.

SR

Antiquated Vagaries said...

Alas, I never made it to Lancaster. I was also 15 minutes from the house my Grandmother grew up in during the Great Depression and couldn't go because of the grueling Poster Schedule. I did learn, though, that there is actually a museum about the French-Canadians who came to Woonsocket, RI, and thus about my Grandmother's experience. I might make a trip out of it sometime.