Colleges and Monuments

Sunday's travels took me through Connecticut, New Jersey, Pennsylvania (again), Maryland, and the District of Columbia.  The main attractions on this day turned out to be college campuses and various impressive monuments.  Toward the end of the day, I stopped at a location that was historic, but had no markings at all.

My first stop was Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut.  It is an architecturally-beautiful campus, but my main interest was in seeing the building once named for John C. Calhoun whose name has been changed to the Grace Murray Hopper College.  Since Calhoun's name is actually carved into the façade, I don't know to what lengths they will go to remove it.

The beautiful structure on the left is NOT the Calhoun/Hopper building.  It is north of it.

On the right is the inscription above the door of the Hopper College above the courtyard gate.

I passed through a small portion of New York state, but turned on the outer loop in order to avoid the traffic.  In Westchester County, I stopped at the "Great Hunger Memorial," which pays tribute to Irish immigrants who came to America during the time of the potato famine.  The statue of a family, nearly starving, is lifelike and touching.



This route took me across the Tappan Zee bridge (being replace by a spectacular new one) and through New Jersey.

I visited Princeton, NJ, on my ride down the Lincoln Highway a few years ago.  This time, I their HUGE battle monument (American Revolution, George Washington) and drove by Princeton University.  I read quite a bit about Princeton when I was studying Woodrow Wilson, who was president there.

I also tried to avoid most of the Philadelphia traffic, since I had seen the downtown sights there as well.  I moved south into Maryland and Baltimore.  On an earlier trip, I had seen the sports stadiums and Fort McHenry, but not the downtown area.  I was surprised to see that they had a "Washington Monument," which is in a downtown square next to a statue of the Marquis de Lafayette on horseback.

As a kept moving down U.S. 1 toward Washington, I passed through Laurel, Maryland.  Right on the highway is the Laurel Shopping Center, where Alabama's George Wallace was campaigning for president on May 15, 1972, when he was shot several times here by Arthur Bremer.  Wallace survived, but was paralyzed for life.  The details and the film remnants are sketchy, but historians believe the most accurate assessment of where it happened was in the direction that the old "Giant Food" sign is pointing.  Between that and the actual grocery store is a Bank of America, and the shooting happened somewhere behind where that building is located today, near the shopping cart storage.


Here is the only proof I drove through DC.  It was getting dark, but (driving by) I saw FBI, Justice, some Smithsonian museums, the African-American Museum, the Vietnam wall, the Lincoln, Washington, and Jefferson Memorials, Arlington, and the Pentagon.

Spent the night near Fredericksburg, VA.