May 13–A Tour of Richmond

This morning I awoke to the pleasant scent of French toast and sausage wafting up from the ground floor of Rhonda’s house. After a bit of coaxing from Zack, I got out of bed, and we went downstairs to eat the breakfast she had cooked for us. During breakfast, Rhonda asked us what we had planned for the day. We didn’t really know ourselves, so she offered to give us a tour of the town later that afternoon.

 

While we waited for afternoon to come, Zack and I decided to do a bit more relaxing and watch a movie (the time The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen). Shortly before the movie was finished, Rhonda made it back home, and we set off on the tour.

 

One of the first things that we saw on our tour was a long line of historic houses and other various buildings, many of which had been around since the forming of our nation.

Every couple of intersections, we also saw monuments to various people who were influential in either Virginia or the entirety of the USA.

 

Not long afterwards, the road soon turned to cobblestone.

It was a strange feeling knowing that we were driving over roads that were built before cars were invented. Next, we drove past a location that had been used as a munitions factory during the civil war.

One of the neat things about this part of the country is that so many things (factory included) have been there for well over a hundred (if not more) years.

 

After we passed a good deal of other monuments and important buildings in Richmond, we pulled up to the Hollywood Cemetery. While it may sound like a strange name, there are ironically quite a few famous people that have been buried there, including two presidents (John Tyler and James Monroe) and the only president of the ceded states during the civil war (Jefferson Davis).

       

Although it was somewhat strange looking at peoples tombstones, it was really interesting to see some of the older grave sites (there was even a large section of the graveyard solely dedicated to the burial sites of confederate military officers who died during the war).

              

 

Once we left the graveyard, we made a brief stop at Rhonda’s home, then made our way over to Chili’s to meet with her son and his family. It was nice getting to know all of them over dinner, though their oldest daughter (about one and a half) was too scared to look at Zack or myself throughout the most of the dinner (as soon as she had her food in front of her and realized we were eating too, she turned around and was fine—I guess she figured out we weren’t all that bad).

Finally, we went back to Rhonda’s house, watched a couple more movies, and went to bed.

 

 

Interesting Observations:

-Though most places we’ve been to have had a fairly straightforward organization, the graveyard was not one of them. For a while, Rhonda, Zack nor I could figure out how to get out of the graveyard. When we made it back to the entrance, we took a look at the map, which simply looked like a bunch of scribbles.

-The local baseball team in Richmond definitely does not rank on the list of the worlds most fierce mascots. We didn’t get to see a game (Zack would have refused even if we did have time), but we did drive past the stadium of the Flying Squirrels.