Before we left Bethlehem this morning, we did the obligatory spin through the old steel mills neighborhood. (I've written about this derelict site, once the proud home of the Bethlehem Steel Corporation, in my book 500 Places to See Before They Disappear.) Bob's father and all his uncles worked here for years; Bob himself had a summer job here as a janitor. Good incentive to go to college, you gotta say that for it. After the steel went bust, the smokestacks went cold and the mills stood empty for several years, big rusting ghosts in the center of town. I guess you could say they have their own weird poetry:
Finally, the Sands Casino rehabbed one of the old mills and recently opened it for business, offering nonstop slot action. Bob's sisters have been talking about this for ages, and I have to admit I was skeptical about it ever really happening. Well, it did, and this was our first chance to finally see it. I'm not sure this is exactly what this economically depressed area needs, but I have to give them props for the clever adaption of the industrial site. They've hung their blazing red logo on an old railroad crane across the entrance:
After that we drove out to the site of Bob's other summer job -- the Saucon Valley Country Club, where he used to caddy for the rich steel executives as they busily charmed clients into buying American steel. If this course hadn't been such a plum place to play golf, the U.S. steel mills might have gone belly-up years earlier. It's such a great course, it seems that they're having the U.S. Women's Open there right now -- at any rate we saw this giant merchandise tent set up at the edge of the course:
The real reason for going past the country club, though, is to drive on Saucon Valley Road, which has a fantastic series of whoopdedoo bumps -- if you drive fast enough (and we always do), it's like riding on a roller coaster. Ticklebelly Road, the kids call it. Well, I guess if you grow up in Bethlehem, you need to have something to do in the car on a Saturday night . . . .
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We headed west on I-78 towards Reading, then followed I-81 south. By the time we needed to stop for lunch, we were at Carlisle, Pennsylvania. Its main claim to fame as far as we're concerned is Dickinson College. Hugh applied to Dickinson and got accepted, but he'd never actually visited the campus. Everyone told us it was beautiful, and they were right -- what a little gem, an ensemble of neat fieldstone buildings set around a shady quadrangle with these red Adirondack chairs plopped down on the grass. Here are the kids, buddying up to the statue of physician Benjamin Rush, Dickinson's founder. He looks like he's about to drop his book on Grace's head, doesn't he?
They have this cool new science building too --
After a very respectable lunch at the Gingerbread Man (we enjoyed watching Wimbledon on TV, then we saw the US pull ahead of Brazil in the FIFA Confederations Cup -- a game I'm told the US eventually lost) we had a little walk around town. Favorite pic of the day, taken behind one of the local churches:
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Heading south on I-81 toward Maryland, we decided to try out the GPS system that came with the rental car. I swear, our GPS voice had a speech impediment. "At the next light, turn bleft," the robot lady said. "In five hundred yards, turn bright." (As if we weren't already bright enough...). We had to turn off the voice part, it was driving us so crazy. The GPS gods, however, sent us on a different route than the one the Google map gods had decreed, which caused a momentary short circuit in our navigational peace of mind. We went with the GPS edict, mostly because the GPS gadget was actually in the car with us and could have turned vicious at any minute. It ended up being serendipitous, though, because that route led us through the quaint town of Boonsboro, Maryland, which was founded by some cousins of Daniel Boone, distant ancestors of mine. It's the kind of town that has log cabins on the main street with gift shops inside -- it sounds hokey but honestly looked cool. Then we cut across country and crossed the Potomac river into (briefly) the very tippy-top corner of Virginia, which we wouldn't have gone into if we'd gone the Google route. Boosting this trip's total of states, always a plus.
Our destination: Harper's Ferry, West Virginia, set at the strategic confluence of the Potomac and Shenandoah Rivers, where abolitionist rabble-rouser John Brown convinced a gang of like-minded freedom fighters to attack the federal armory in October 1859. As the front desk clerk at the Comfort Suites informed us, this year is the 150th anniversary of John Brown's raid -- "Or maybe the 150th anniversary of him getting hung. Great. Let's celebrate this guy getting killed, that sounds like fun." I'm glad to know that cynicism is alive and well in West Virginia.
After dumping our gear at the Comfort Suites -- a marvel of chain-motel predictability, not that there's anything wrong with that -- we went into the historic district for dinner. All the costumed reenactors have gone home for the night and the cutesy gift shops are closed, but we had a decent dinner at the Secret Six Tavern, which commemorates six New England abolitionists who secretly funded Brown's activities. Walking along the tavern wall looking at the steel engravings of those guys' faces, I discovered that one of them was Samuel Gridley Howe, who, um, I'm pretty sure is another ancestor of mine. This DAR stuff can be embarrassing sometimes . . . .
