George Washington Birthplace National Monument

We got in the car to leave Richmond and B asked if I wanted to stop at George Washington's Birthplace on the way home. He's had it on his list of weekend drives for awhile and it's sort of on the way home (meaning, just a little bit out of our way)and the kids are learning about our founding fathers this week, and it's almost President's Day, so I agreed. Not counting the stop, it took us 3 1/2 hours to drive home and it's normally 2 1/2 to 3. Not bad. And totally worth it.

I loved it. First, it was free. Second, it wasn't a huge amount of space to explore (although I'm sure we missed a lot). Plus, there were only a handful of tourists there so we got a park ranger to ourselves showing us the reconstructed house and the kitchen. AND, we got to hear little pigs squeal. I'm not sure I've ever heard pigs actually squeal in real life. Very satisfying. And there were sheep and a solo chicken wandering around. Little Guy kept telling me he wanted to go say hi to the sheep. And he kept asking me where all the other chickens were, and why that chicken wasn't flying. I'm excited to go back in warmer weather and explore some more of the outdoors stuff and there's supposedly an old shipping dock/wharf or something down the road.

The weird, knobby tree in front of the reconstructed house is the oldest tree in the area. They think it is celebrating it's 229th birthday this year. It's a hackberry tree and they also think it is the result of the fire that burned the Washington's house down around the same time the tree sprouted. Somehow a seed from inside made it outside and started growing.

B enjoyed that the reconstructed house turned out to be built on the wrong foundation. They built it several years ago for a Washington anniversary of some sort certain that they were building it on the correct, old foundation. Later, they discovered the real foundation of his childhood home (the picture I took where you just see the white outline of the house on the ground) a few feet away, and drastically smaller. The old house could have fit in the entry hall of the new house.


Swearing them in as Junior Rangers after the fact. The Rangers forgot to give us the packets until after we'd already toured the park and were leaving, so they sent the packets home with us.