amkean pronunciation

Luckily, my feeling of being alone at the national parks was ended when I drove up to Manassas. Not only were there plenty of cars in the visitor's center lot, but my tour seemed to be coinciding with a boys' lacrosse team outing. Although half of the team were wearing kepis and I wouldn't mind having them in class for a day to see what it's like when your kids value school, my estimation was that the trip to a historic site wasn’t decided by majority team vote. The chaperones/coaches asked questions, but the kids were just staring or starting to whisper on the tour that was the whole team and me.

I only spent a few hours in Manassas. I had finished my driving tour in the morning, and then did the podcast tour. I found the Manassas battlefield to require the most imagination, so I didn't stop at every point on the field. Also, there are modern busy roads going through the park unlike the park-only roads at other sites. From Manassas, I hustled to the Chancellorsville visitor's center, where I got the driving tour cd so I could get an early start the following morning.

This I did, and I was done with the Chancellorsville tour and back to the visitor's center before it opened. The young female park ranger who helped me the night before at Chancellorsville (who I had previously met at Fredericksburg that first day) told me that because it was the slow season, I could watch the video on demand the next day instead of having to follow the "every half hour schedule." The 40 year old male ranger the next morning did not offer the same deal, so after I entered the building at 9:03, I had to wait until 9:30 for the show. There was a countdown clock on the wall.

Every site has a video. Most sites have some sort of theater. It's clear the videos aren't produced centrally because they vary widely in content and tone. Some are like watching Ken Burns. Others feature re-enactors. Some are clearly outdated. James Earl Jones and Richard Dreyfuss were two recognizable narrators. One of the Appomattox videos has a clear positive spin, as in "everyone was now friends again" type of vibe. Sometimes the videos cost money, and some are free. Sometimes they're included in admission cost, although not every site charges. One exception to the video rule was Cold Harbor. No video there. That only might have been the smallest center I saw, though. The closed captioning wasn't working on one screen, which meant that I wasn't distracted by the words which I CANNOT HELP READING.

On to Richmond, and I did the Wilderness and Spotsylvania tours on the way, although at Spotsylvania, I encountered the other problem with off-season travel. They were doing a controlled burn in the park, so much of it was off-limits. They didn't mention this when I bought the driving tour, not that I expected them to, but it would have been nice. In many of the visitor centers, there was maintenance work going on. The interpretive labels were gone at Spotsylvania. I'm guessing all this will be done for the summer season.

Spotsylvania was the hardest site for me to imagine. I never really got my bearings, partly because I could only see a little section of the battlefield. There were lots of cars parked in one spot, the Bloody Angle, where you'd expect to see tourists, but all the cars were personnel. This was the story the entire trip. When I drove to Catharine Furnace on the Chancellorsville site, I saw another car parked there. Inevitably, this was a local runner. I could count on this happening with rare exceptions. It would be really good running at those parks.

Labels: travel