What a good time we’ve had in Pennsylvania!  Our campground, situated  between Gettysburg and York,   is a working farm, complete with gardens, animals and fields of corn.  The last time we were here, Bear had a flock of turkeys following him around and fighting for his attention.  No such luck this time, but I had a great time petting the goats, they are so funny.  The farm’s garden also provided us with fresh produce available at the Trading Post.  There is nothing like fresh-picked tomatoes!  I found out that yellow tomatoes are less acid than red ones and easier on the stomach… live and learn…

2 weeks is enough to acclimate to an area, and by now, we have our favorite meat shop, hardware store and grocery store, along with a few favorite restaurants. For home-style cooking, try Yesteryears in East Berlin.  They also have the mother-of-all-breakfast-buffet on Saturday mornings.  I highly recommend their Ham and Bean soup, you won’t regret it.  Not far from East Berlin, in Abbotstown, the Hoffbrauhaus serves authentic German cuisine, one of Bear’s favorite.

Yesteryear's Ham and Beans soup, yummmmmy!

A 1700's house in East Berlin.

Of course, the fact that we are just a few minutes from the “Mecca” of all fiber shop  was not lost on me…  “The Mannings” started about 60 years ago as a weaving school,   but since Carol and Ron Woolcox bought the business in the 1980’s, they added  knitting, crochet  and spinning to the list of the shop’s offerings.

Carol Woolcox, owner of "The Mannings" and Chicken... of course...

Carol is a knitter and a crocheter at heart, although she says about weaving “there is something about throwing a shuttle back and forth and beating the threads in place that is satisfying”.  They offer and incredible array of tools, books, patterns, kits and equipment for the fiber addict.

In need of yarns? patterns? tools?... if you need it, they have it!

Just a few of their weaving looms!

The whole set-up is gorgeous, like a typical Pennsylvania farm.

The grounds even include this old-style barn, painted "Sang de boeuf"(beef blood) color.

Check out their class schedule… wow!  It does not hurt either that Carol and Ron are RVers and we ended up having a good time chatting about traveling and motorhomes.  Their dream is to retire one day and travel full-time in their motorhome. Of course I did hurt my wallet (well… bear’s wallet huhummmm) while there (it’s hard not to) and I signed up for a “Beginning weaving class” in October, so we’ll be back in this area soon.

Our day in York didn’t go so well, it turns out that parking in York is really not for the faint of heart.  Bring a lot of change for the parking meters if you come here, that’s probably your only option, they do have parking lots, but most of them are for monthly permit holders.  Since we were short on change, we did not see much of York.

We were a bit smarter when we went to Gettysburg and brought a bunch of quarters with us.  I love downtown  Gettysburg , the square offers historical buildings, museums, shops, restaurant and bistros, everything for a good time. Of course, there is a rich history here, and you can go visit the battlefields and the museums, but we did that 2 years ago, so we just enjoyed a nice day in town and a delicious meal this time.

Downtown Gettysburg

Bear getting some pointers from Abe Lincoln himself. (Bronze statue of Abraham Lincoln called "Return Visit" by J. Seward Johnson Jr.)

The Wills House. Now a museum, Abraham Lincoln slept there on November 18 and 19, 1863, the nights before his immortal Gettysburg Address.

Since I am into weaving these days… I really enjoyed finding the American Crafts shop which displayed fine examples of handweaving, lots of good stuff for inspiration!

Handwoven blankets for sale at the American Crafts Shop.

We also took time to do a bit of maintenance on the coach, and I finished a project I had been working on FOREVER!  It took me nearly a year to complete the afghan I had promised to knit for my aunt Thérèse!    Whewwww…. it was about time!

My aunt's afghan, finished and drying on a picnic table.

This is not our first time in the Williamsburg area, in fact, we were here 2 years ago.  Since we had already visited Colonial Williamsburg (see blog post here) we were not too upset about the fact that the temperature was in the triple digits and we were not able to go walk around for hours.

Instead, we decided on a 2 hour narrated cruise in Norfolk’s very busy harbor, which turned out to be the perfect choice since we had a nice breeze the whole time.  So, from Williamsburg, we made our way to Norfolk to find the Nauticus , departure point of our cruise.   Driving there turned out to be quite an adventure in itself since our TomTom GPS  loves to send us through small streets, alleys and one ways (usually the wrong way) and gets very annoyed with us when we do not follow her exact directions (commands would be more of an appropriated word), so after a very colorful exchange between yours truly and a GPS, where the words “idiot” and “stupid” were spoken a number of times,   we finally made it in time for the cruise! My GPS and I have a love-hate relationship and I affectionately nicknamed her, “the freaking idiot”.

We boarded the Victory Rover  and away we went.

The Victory Rover

The cruise was narrated by a very knowledgeable staff, the Navy ships were a sight to behold and we learned a lot along the way.   Even if Bear  calls me a “sponge” and even if he keeps praising my memory, there is no way I could ever remember everything we saw and learned that day, but here are the highlights 🙂

USS Bainbridge

The Destroyer USS Bainbridge is well known because of its participation in saving Capt Phillips from Somalian pirates on April 12, 2009.  This was the first incident involving pirates and a US ship, the Maersk Alabama .  You can read the entire story here.  The USS Bainbridge is an  Arleigh Burke-class guided missile destroyer.  According to our tour guide, the ship cost just under 2 billion dollars to build.  She can identify over 100 targets at a time, and differentiate between friends and foes.  She can fire a missile every 1 1/2 second.

USS George H. W. Bush

The USS George H. W. Bush has the distinction of being the most expensive ship in the Navy, with a cost of 6.2 billion dollars.  It is an aircraft carrier and was named for the 41st US President, George H. W. Bush who was a naval aviator during World War II.  The ship’s nickname is Avenger after the TBM Avenger aircraft flown by Lieutenant G. Bush during WW II.

We were tickled pink when we saw our first submarine!  A Los Angeles class.

Los Angeles class nuclear submarine

USS Nicholas (frigate)

Hiding in the back was the USS Nicholas, which on April 1st, 2010 came under fire from Somali pirates near the coast of Kenya.  The Nicholas seized 5 pirates, sank their skiff and captured the pirate’s mother ship.

USS Wisconsin's big guns... and Chicken

Back at the Nauticus, we strolled through the museum and then went to visit the USS Wisconsin.  This ship has the biggest guns ever installed on a battleship.  16 inch guns, 60 feet long, they can fire as far as 27 nautical miles.    She served in the Pacific during WW II.  She was launched in December 1943.  She is now a museum ship at Nauticus, the National Maritime Center in Norfolk, VA.

Whatever you do, do not eat at the cafeteria in Nauticus, unless you enjoy bad food… ask us how we know… 😉

Speaking of food though, we went back to the Carrot Tree in Yorktown for a nice lunch, something we had truly enjoyed the last time we were in the Williamsburg area.

Of course, I went yarn shopping, especially since my niece Maude just had a new baby, “Mademoiselle Béatrice”, a 5 1/2 pound bundle of joy who could not wait to see the world, so she was born a month early.  I bought some wonderful yarn at Coordinated Colors in Yorktown and had a lot of fun knitting this Norwegian style sweater for Miss Béatrice.

Sweater for Béatrice

From Alabama we made our way to Asheville North Carolina.  The popularity of Asheville grew in the late 1800’s when its reputation for clean fresh mountain air and clear water brought people who were having breathing problems.   Tuberculosis was rampant and Asheville became the leader in its treatment.  Families would come with their ailing loved ones and would decide to stay.  The vaccine for Tuberculosis was invented here.

Parked next to the French Broad river, we were very close all the activities.  The first day we decided to take a Red Trolley tour, to acquaint ourselves with the town and decide what we wanted to see.  Of course, the first thing you think about when you go to Asheville, is the Biltmore Estate.  And what an Estate it is!

Biltmore house

The house, designed by architect Richard Morris Hunt,   boasts 4 acres of floor space!  The 250 room mansion features 33 bedrooms, 43 bathrooms, 65 fireplaces, three kitchens, even an indoor swimming pool and a bowling alley!  It was equipped with the latest amenities; running water, electricity, refrigerators! We take this for granted today, but back then? Wow! Keep in mind this house first opened its doors to family and friends, after 6 years of construction work, on Christmas Eve 1895!

Stone carvers were the highest paid employees during the construction and are responsible for the house ornate decorations.

This limestone castle sat on 125, 000 acres of forests, including a farm and a dairy, a 250 acres wooded park designed by Frederick Law Olsmted, the man who designed Central Park in New York city and is known as the founding father of American landscape architecture!  The grounds also included 5 pleasure gardens and 30 miles of macadamized roadway.

view of the gardens

In the conservatory, plants and flowers are being grown to supply the house.

This house was the brainchild of George Washington Vanderbilt, and he was 33 years old and still unmarried when he opened Biltmore.  He was the grandchild of Commodore Cornelius Vanderbilt who quit school at age 11 to go work in the shipping business.  At age 16, he borrowed $100 from his mother and started a ferry service across New York Bay, which eventually became a fleet of more than 100 steamboats that traveled as far as Central America and Europe.  50 years later, the Commodore earned his second fortune investing in railroads.  Patriarch of a sizable family; his wife of 53 years Sophia, 13 children, 37 grandchildren and 27 great-grandchildren.  He left the bulk of his fortune of $100 millions to his eldest son, William Henry.  Even if his father had deemed him unsuited for business, William Henry took over the family fortune and doubled it.  George was Henry’s youngest child and inherited 10 millions upon his death.

The conservatory

He married Edith Stuyvesant Dresser in June 1898 in Paris and the couple came to live at the Estate that fall after honeymooning.  They were attended by a large staff and were known as kind and generous employers.  George realized his dream of a productive estate.  The farms yielded fruits, vegetables and grain crops, dairy products and honey.  The forest produced 100s of cords of firewood annually which were sold along with lumber process in Biltmore’s own mill.  Today, a million visitors a year visit the estate, which is still owned and managed by his descendants.

There were no pictures allowed inside the house, but I can vouch for the fact that it has been wonderfully restored and maintained, and contains a lot of the original furnishing and treasures original to the house.

12 bones

A visit to Asheville would be incomplete without a meal at” 12 Bones”.  This famous BBQ place has won the title of “Best Bite” on Good Morning America.  President Obama ate there a few months ago.  The restaurant is open from 11 to 4 on weekdays only.  There is always a line at the door, even at 11 in the morning.

12 bones restaurant in Asheville NC

Chicken found a comfortable place to sit while waiting, and dreamed of tender butts and sweet racks!

We ate delicious dry rub ribs with corn pudding and collard greens, Bear also had jalapeno grits.  Sorry, no pictures of the food, I forgot….

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The last day, we drove along the famous Blue Ridge Parkway and enjoyed the vistas.

Yup, he just had to get in the picture again...

View from the Blue Ridge Parkway