Road-Testing the New Toys

Friday night. Sarah, who got 100 on her spelling test today (much improved over last week), is sitting with me and when I say "let's have a family fun weekend" she answers, "It would be nice to stay in a hotel." Well, the problem is it's already Friday and we haven't made plans. "But I haven't tried out my Nintendo DS on a road trip." It isn't clear to me how the Nintendo DS would play any differently on a road trip than it does at home or in a restaurant, but I note the point.

Then Tam comes home. I mention the conversation. She says she was thinking the same thing. Thursday was our 15th wedding anniversary, so we've been celebrating, and despite the horrors on Wall Street, we still have some tax refunds and such. Tam says that she's missing water, since we did mountains for vacation and haven't seen the Bay or the ocean all year. So she's thinking of our old haunts in southern Maryland, on the western shore of Chesapeake Bay. Only an hour or two away.

Well, now that you mention it, I have a new laptop, and a new little GPS receiver, neither of which has been road tested. (The GPS finds Red Pine Street just fine, and requires the laptop to function -- couldn't afford the freestanding kind -- but I've been wanting to try it out.)

Okay, I'm supposed to finish a book chapter this weekend, but not for work -- for a reference book that pays only 100 pounds sterling. It's already late so an extra day or two won't matter. This will be an anniversary getaway.

So we made a reservation at our old haunts in Lexington Park, Maryland, near the Patuxent River Naval Air Station (Pax River), which lies near such sites as Solomon's Island, Point Lookout, Old St. Mary's City, etc. We'll road test the new toys and get away overnight on Saturday. This post from more than a year ago gives you the basic geography.

Ah, thinks I, I'm pretty sure St. Mary's City, the old historic site of Maryland's first capital, of which we are members, sent me something recently, so I check the old E-mail and sure enough I discover that tomorrow is a militia muster with colonial reenactors. Adding to the fun is the fact that the E-mail, like the web page I just linked to, mentions that you can:

• Discover how able-bodied male colonists were required to arm themselves and be prepared to defend the colony against pirates, Virginians, and others intent on plundering.

We are, at least officially if not by birth, Virginians, so this could be fun. I haven't plundered nearly enough lately. (Also note that in the pc era, "Indians" aren't mentioned.) I presume this is a reference to the Kent Island War, which doesn't even google up, but you can find the basics in the Wikipedia article on William Claiborne that I've linked to. If you're a Catholic Marylander, Claiborne was an evil puritan pirate; if you're a Virginia Protestant, he was a Virginia patriot defending the English Commonwealth against the papist infestation of Maryland. I'm a Virginia Catholic, so I have no idea what to make of him, but Virginia lost and Kent Island is Maryland's still. The period of the English Civil War was known in Maryland as "the plundering time," and it was Virginians and Cromwellians who were plundering. Though the picture of Claiborne on the Wikipedia site suggests he was at least more a cavalier by hairstyle than a roundhead, if you make much of haircuts. I think he was mostly fighting for William Claiborne. It's complicated, and fortunately Maryland and Virginia only fight over water rights in the Potomac these days. Only five years ago the Supreme Court had to get involved in that, though. We won.

And, of course, I realize that most American kids these days probably don't even study the English civil war. Most American history books jump from Jamestown and the Pilgrims to the preparatory stuff for the Revolution, like the French and Indian War.

More from the road test.

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