Where’s Waldo?

April 22

I saw a 500 note with Stonewall Jackson's image on it.

We stopped at the Stonewall Jackson Shrine.

Where are we?

As most of you can guess, Virginia. 

We set out from Montclair on Thursday morning and stopped at Fredericksburg, mainly to visit the Capital Ale House.

We stayed at the Inn at the Old Silk Mill, a bed and breakfast. The Bed was a four-poster. There was hot water, but you had to wait about 10 minutes for it to get to the room.

There was a framed display of Confederate money in the breakfast room. Stonewall made the 500. Jeff Davis only made the five.

Wifi failed, which put me at a small disadvantage. But overall, it was fun, and I may go there again. 

At the Ale House I had a couple of IPAs and a red ale or two. We had a salad and crab cakes to start. And this is the interesting thing: They were crab cakes.

Normally a joint takes a little crab for flavor and grinds it into too much flour. What you get is a nasty, doughy cake. 

These had real chunks of crab. 

We also had a plate with a knackwurst and a bratwurst with sauerkraut and potato salad. Very good. Probiotic too, because of the sauerkraut.

We set out for Durham, where we are to meet Adrian Bejan. He's a very cool professor of engineering at Duke University. We had worked together on several stories—many of them satisfyingly controversial—about his theory of design. He argues that human engineering and nature work on the same principle, that systems must simplify and become more efficient to survive.

We stopped at the Stonewall Jackson Shrine. We had been there before, but not when the building was open. We got to talk to the park ranger on duty.

Jackson was carried in a wagon from a field hospital, where his arm was amputated. It was a long trip, maybe two days. They brought him to the Chandler Plantation to put him on a train to Richmond, but that plan didn't work because the tracks had already been ripped up by Union soldiers.

He stayed at the plantation office building, where he developed pneumonia and died.

The Chandlers' daughter, Lucy, was much moved by Jackson’s death. Years later, she formed a ladies' group that restored the office building and created the shrine. The property at the time was owned by a railroad. 

The plantation, without slave labor, had gone out of business and was in decay. The main house, I think, was already gone at the time. What’s now the shrine was about to go, too, when Lucy came to the rescue.

Lucy Chandler had kept the blankets and the clock from the room where Jackson died. The bed in the current room had been stored somewhere else. So those pieces are original to the scene.

According to the ranger, Lucy Chandler is the one who called it a shrine.

We headed toward Durham from there.

It's supposed to be a three and a half hour drive from Federicksburg (according to Google Maps), but it took us closer to six. We ran into heavy backups caused by road work. Three times along the route two lanes merged into one.

Then I managed to get lost in Durham. We asked for directions and went straight to the hotel.

Need I say that, after all that, the beer drinking needed to commence?

I had an good, bitter IPA called Flagship, from Carolina Brewing, and an excellent amber ale from Red Oak, another North Carolina brewery.

We had a Caesar salad made with kale in place of romaine that was very tasty. We also shared strip steak with shoestring French fries that brought tears to my eyes.

Then it was time to call it quits, Gang.

Sleep well.