Charlottesville: UVA, Montpelier, and Monticello

Norah rolled into Charlottesville with two goals: To check out UVA and to check out of this family vacation.

UVA loosely meets Norah’s working criteria for choosing a university – it’s a large-ish campus (20,000 undergrads), in an urban area, and in a place where she will not need to bring a heavy winter coat.

We walked campus and had lunch in the neighborhood just across the street from the quad. Overall, she was smitten enough with the campus that she started texting me admissions requirements later that same afternoon.

After the campus visit, we rolled into the Charlottesville airport and bade her farewell. Like last year’s trip, she flew home at the midpoint to get back to her own busy summer life in Evanston.

Ben and I proceeded to have the kind of epic in-town afternoon that only happens at the midway point of a camping road trip: laundry, oil change, car wash, bookstore, and grocery store. By the end of the night, we were largely reorganized and reprovisioned for the next leg of our trip.

The next morning, the three remaining Finkels set off for two significant sites in the Charlottesville area: James Madison’s Montpelier and Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello. Both are extremely well preserved and both offer informative tours.

At both estates, I was struck by how powerful it was to stand in a place where great men created great things. At Montpelier, the tour culminates in an office where you stare out the window where Madison stared as he wrote text that would eventually morph into the US Constitution.

At Monticello, you casually peruse Jefferson’s collection of tokens and gifts he received for arranging such momentous historical activities as Lewis and Clark’s expedition and the Louisiana Purchase.

By design, you also grapple with the fact that these magnificent estates only functioned because of slavery and that despite these men’s lasting doctrines about unalienable rights, there were some fairly significant limits to their thinking about American freedom.

We took a mid-day break at the historic Miche Tavern, where an all-you-can-eat southern-style lunch delivered a delicious mid-day break, and rolled back into camp in the early evening to relax.