We had a great Shabbos with our friends Avi and Debbie and their kids.  Thanks for hosting us!

This morning, we drove just a few miles over to Hampton National Historic Site:

This site preserves the estate owned by the Ridgely family for seven generations, from 1745 to 1948. The mansion was the largest private home in America when it was completed in 1790:

Next to the mansion is the icehouse:

We visited the Ridgely family cemetery on the grounds:

The mansion looks the same from the front and the rear.  This symmetry is a trait of the mansion’s Georgian Architecture:

The kids completed their Junior Ranger workbooks and received their badges:

We continued north, crossing from Maryland into Pennsylvania:

We eventually entered New Jersey, then New York.  At last we arrived at the freeway exit for our house:

See the trip map for today’s drive and our current location.

This morning we visited George Washington Birthplace National Monument:

The outline in the foreground shows the location of the home in which George Washington was born and lived until he was three years old.  The commemorative building in the background  was erected in 1931 on the location thought to be where the house used to stand.  Later, when this area was slated to be converted into a parking lot for the visitor center, site excavations to prepare for the parking lot installation revealed the correct location of the historic home:

NPS maintains livestock on the property, as there would have been here in the 1730s when Washington lived here:

The kids completed their Junior Ranger workbooks and received their badges:

We continued north, crossing the Potomac river into Maryland:

Our next stop was Thomas Stone National Historic Site.  This is our 200th visited National Park Site:

The site preserves the cemetery and home of Thomas Stone, one of Maryland’s signers of the Declaration of Independence:

The family slaves were buried outside the cemetery.  The NPS has marked the probable location of the slave cemetery with this marker:

The ranger led us on a tour through the Stone home, known as Haberdeventure:

The kids completed their Junior Ranger workbooks and received their badges:

We continued North to overnight at our friends’ house in Baltimore.

Good Shabbos from Baltimore, Maryland!  See the trip map for today’s drive and our current location.