We just returned from a 2 week vacation, and it was fabulous…for a couple of reasons.  One was that everything went smoothly while we were gone.  Clients were well served, transactions closed, ads were done  and Mike, Fawn, Nickie and Graham were still happy when we returned.  They did an incredible job.

And as all that was going on here, we were having a wonderful time!  We started in Virginia, exploring historical sites dating from Jamestown, founded in 1608, to Civil War battlefields.  We saw George Washington’s office when he was a young surveyor for the King in the wilderness (now Winchester, Virginia) at the gateway to the Shenandoah Valley and the room where he died almost 50 years later at Mt. Vernon, beloved by the nation he was so instrumental in creating.  We saw the Capitol building at Williamsburg where the House of Burgesses for the colony of Virginia adjourned for the last time, left the building, and returned as the House of Burgesses for the Commonwealth of Virginia.  The men who deliberated in that room included George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Patrick Henry and George Mason. 

We toured the house at Arlington where Robert E. Lee and his wife lived for the first 30 years of their marriage – a house built by her father as a memorial to his stepfather, George Washington.  The Lees left the house at the outbreak of the Civil War, never to return.  It was occupied by the Union during the war and commanded by a former classmate of Robert E. Lee’s at West Point, who turned the grounds into a Union cemetery.

We walked the incredibly beautiful battlefield at Manassas at sunrise – several hundred acres where 2500 men died at the first Battle of Bull Run in 1861 and over 25,000 died just over a year later – both sides convinced that their’s was the just cause.

From Virginia we went to Washington, D.C. where we saw memorials and libraries and offices and statues and parks.  It was an incredible trip, and we came home with a sense of awe over what those who have come before us have created.  It’s not perfect, but it’s sure worth keeping. 

Â