Our eventual goal was Poughkeepsie for tonight, and we hoped to get to West Point in time to go to the museum and walk around the grounds.
This was about a 200 mile trip, and knowing us, you’ll know that we didn’t get an early start in Ithaca. Anyway, most of our trip was uneventful, but as we neared West Point there were several squalls of thunderstorms. And it poured. Wipers on the rental car weren’t as good as they might have been.
When we got to West Point, it turns out that you can’t just randomly go in there since 9-11, or at least that’s what the guard told us, though the woman in the car ahead of us did, and obviously there are things in there that civilians can see. But he sent us to Highland Falls, the town below, where the West Point museum is actually located. From there we could take a bus tour of the campus, which was actually just as well. We were treated to a lot of views of athletic facilities, but we also got a visit to the chapel.
This is a beautiful building with a lot of history. The chapel has a long history, most of which I’ve already forgotten, but involves its being torn down and rebuilt in another place on the campus. In the 20th century, a number of classes donated the windows for the church, but in the name of classes a hundred years before. The Williams stained glass company in Philly made all the windows. They made the first one in 1935 or so for $300 and they kept the price the same for each window until the last one in 1975. The pictures don’t really do it justice.
The organ in the church has 23,000 pipes and about a million stops and presets. Apparently this is a really good job, because they’ve only had four organists here in the last 50 years. The chapel also has a reserved pew near the front of the church in which a candle burns 8 hours a day. The candle will burn until the last POW/MIA returns, and the seat will never be filled until that time. In other words, never, since we’ll always have a good war going.
After West Point we were planning the cross the Hudson at Newburgh, but we must have missed the sign and ended up going up the east side of the Hudson instead of the west, but our hotel is not too far from the next bridge up. I took a picture of the bridge just to be funny. Not bad for a picture taken while driving.
We just came back from dinner where we discovered that John left his credit card at the Ale House last night. We called them, and they have it, but there's no way they're willing to send it to us, so we had to cancel it. (No small project when you haven't got the number written down, by the way.)
No comments:
Post a Comment