03.06 - Day 140 - Annapolis to Harpers Ferry
Monday 3rd June - Annapolis, Maryland to Harpers Ferry, West Virginia (Day 140)
With a full working week ahead for Dave and Lauren we make ourselves scarce and get out of the way of full time life with two young girls. Dave drops us at Hertz in the larger-than-I’d-realised Annapolis where we collect a car that is neither electric, nor even red, much to the kids' disappointment.
Our first stop is a mere five minutes away; schoolwork is calling and today’s will be done in an empty food court at a Westfield Shopping Centre. Where motivation is needed (as it usually is with Seb) it comes in the form of a library which opens at 10am where we head just as soon as the work has had some good progress. Sienna and Seb then read for 30 minutes before we took out nine books using Charlotte’s cards.
Our uneventful car takes us an uneventful 80 minutes to Harpers Ferry - a small village on a point between the Potomac River and Shenandoah River (which then leads all the way down to Washington DC). On the approach you get brief glimpses of old stone buildings popping up through the woodland on this triangle of steep land.
Turning up, as usual blind to the area, our first stop - after groceries from Walmart - is the Welcome Centre where we start to form plans of sights, walks and National Parks. We drop our bags at the slightly dated but well positioned Quality Inn and venture to the Lower Town. With the warm sun shining down the valley we start to learn about the town’s importance since it was founded by Mr Harper and his ferry service in the mid 18th century.
Since then it's featured in the Civil War a hundred years later, and just prior one of the sparks in the form of John Brown trying to initiate a slave revolt So there are plaques everywhere, and indeed more on former buildings when the river waters power was harnessed during the industrial growth. A lot of history about which we know very little - Sienna and Seb asking questions and I don’t even know the difference between the Union and the Confederates, “But who were the good guys?” Seb wants to know.
History leads to hunger so we settle down on the deck of The Rabbit Hole, looking out over the two train tracks crossing the river, plus the foot stones of two former bridges that have since washed away.
After a fried dinner we walk across one of the bridges spotting turtles and large fish - who are some distance away from the hopeful fishermen standing in the river. And that wraps us up.