We're Home ... 2

The Breezewood exit on the Pennsylvania Turnpike has some significance for me. For many years it was a scheduled stop on the 8th Grade Washington Trip sponsored by Harmon Middle School (Aurora, Ohio), where I taught for ... a LONG time. Our buses pulled off at Breezewood, cruised up to the McDonald's parking lot, disgorged the hordes of 8th graders, who promptly consumed mounds of fast food, visited the restrooms, returned to the buses in somewhat different shape. And off to D. C. we went.

I retired from Harmon in January 1997, but ever since then, on our way to D. C. (or, lately, Staunton, VA, to see a production at the American Shakespeare Center), Joyce and I have always stopped at the Breezewood McD's, had a Diet Coke (or worse), and I'd regale her with stories of Years Past when the building was aswarm with 8th graders excited to be Away From Home and on their way to see the Nation's Capital (and to wreak havoc on a motel room).

But to get to that McDonald's, you have to turn left off the I-76 exit ramp and head down into the little town, but we were going another direction this time, so we turned right on US 30 and headed on east toward Chambersburg, PA, where, as I wrote yesterday, we visited some sites related to Abolitionists John Brown and Frederick Douglass, sites important in Joyce's research on Brown.

US 30 (the Lincoln Highway) twists and turns on its eastward leg. My dad, driving us through the Rockies (and/or other mountains), would call these turns crickety-crocks, aping, I'm sure, what one of us little boys had called them. And there are lots of crickety-crocks on US 30--many occasions to slow and marvel.

There is also some ... alarm. In several places are ramps for "runaway trucks"--gravel-"paved" routes heading up slopes designed to accommodate runaway rigs. Here are two concerns:

• All of the ramps we saw had the tracks of wheels in them. Meaning; A runaway truck had visited recently--not a comforting thought.
• Can a runaway really wait until it arrives at one of the ramps? If one is not convenient, must it, oh, roar off a cliff? Or up the backside of the first black Prius it comes to? (Hint: We drive a black Prius.)

Anyway, after the crickety-crocks and the runaway-ramps, we arrived safely in Chambersburg--a mere ten minutes before our scheduled 3 o'clock tour of the John Brown House. Joyce and I joined another couple (both retired); he, we learned, had been an Australian political journalist whose beat was D.C. They loved the nearby mountains. Stayed in them when he retired. And they now travel around looking at historical sites.

As we were walking down to the city square, he pointed out to me the statue of the Union solider, standing, facing the South (the Confederates had burned virtually all of the town, late July 1864). Our Australian companion told us the only problem with the south-facing solider? The Confederates came from the west.

(Not my pic, but you can see the soldier at the far left.)