This is not the best way to wake up...
Especially if your car is 3 weeks old and has 685 miles on the odometer. Fortunately, the damage was several scrapes along the passenger side of the car -- we have been in touch with our and the offender's insurance companies will make a claim on their insurance and get the damage fixed when we get home.
It was a foggy gray morning when we turned into the approach road of President James Monroe's Highland, which is lined with 147 Ash trees planted 100 years ago.
The on-line reviews of this site noted that the original home on this site burned in the 1930’s and the only buildings from Monroe’s time here are the guesthouse for Presidential visitors and some outbuildings. The home now on the site is from another time. With our expectations suitably adjusted we still wanted to see the site and add to our meager knowledge of the 5th President: Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Madison, Monroe.
Here are the highlights of what we learned about Monroe today. He was born in 1758 in Northern Virginia and at age 16 upon his parent’s deaths he became a slave owner. He owned over 300 people in his lifetime. He fought in the Revolutionary War and was wounded at the Battle of Trenton. He was 24 years old when he moved to Highland with his 16-year-old bride. During his political career he was: Governor of Virginia, Ambassador to France (he was present at Napoleon’s coronation) Great Britain and Spain. He served as Secretary of State and of War. He became President in 1817 and served two terms. The Munroe’s returned to Highland between those 25 years of political appointments. He died five years after Adams and Jefferson on the same date, July 4th.
After the formal tour we wandered around the grounds and looked at the exhibits in the outbuildings.
There was excellent signage around the property: short, single topic, easy to read.
Upon returning to the Gift shop Harry decided to try out their augmented reality guided tour of the property.
He was, of course, intrigued by the technology. Subsequently, he strongly suggested that I should also try it out to understand its capabilities. Once outfitted with the earphones and glasses you are told to follow the visual and audio directions to different locations to see and hear presentations. In this case the images were basically hand drawn representations of people who lived at Highland. There was Munroe himself and his overseer talking about profits. Slaves concerned about being sold and separated from their families. The images could have been of film of re-enactors. So we began to think about the possibility of using virtual reality to tell the story of what happened on Lexington Green...
After lunch and a two-hour drive we are now in Williamsburg. I am excited about the prospect of going to the Yorktown Victory Museum tomorrow having just finished Nathaniel Philbrick’s book on Yorktown and Harry is interested in returning to Jamestown to see the relatively new Jamestown Settlement Museum.