Day Eight--Mount Vernon

Day Eight
Left Williamsburg heading for Washington DC. We stayed out in the western suburbs so that we’d be close to Larry Warner and Dulles Airport. We dropped off Bonnie at Dulles about ten o’clock this morning and went to Mount Vernon for the day.

George Washington wrote, “No estate in the United American is more pleasantly situated than this . . .”
I'd have to say he was right. It’s a beautiful estate; he acquired about 8000 acres and spent about 50 years improving the land. It helped that he was a slaveholder (279 people who lived at Mount Vernon, including the household, the slaves, free Blacks, the Scottish gardener and other servants.)

The grounds were stunning with an upper garden, lower garden, fruit garden and nursery, salt house, stables, paddocks, slave cabin, servants’ hall (where the visitors’ servants were housed), smokehouse, wash house, coach house, spinning house and on and on. We were just mesmerized by the attention to detail and how beautiful everything was. Some of the trees looked to be original; three people couldn’t reach around them.

Poor George died a hard death; he had a throat infection that made his air passages swell shut and he suffocated. He was 67-years old.

After we left Mount Vernon, we started our three-hour trek back to the hotel. It should have been a 45-minute drive. Needless to say, we were all whipped, tired and dusty from walking all over MV and waiting in line in the hot sun and just want to lie down for a nap. Unfortunately we had about ten minutes to wash up and get over to Larry’s.

It was well worth the hurry. Larry and his wife, Desi, his Brazilian wife live in an architectural wonder themselves. Larry collects cartoon cells, posters, storyboards and has MANY originals in his home. I think he had cells from every Disney movie ever made and many cartoons. I saw Peter Pan, Cinderella, The Tigger Movie, Leghorn Foghorn, Mickey Mouse, Minnie, Lion King, Pirates of the Caribbean, ET, Star Wars, Star Trek and more that I won’t name here. Then, he took us to see his wine cellar; he had around 2,200 bottles of wine. (Picture below) It’s too bad we are all pretty much ambivalent toward wine and can’t tell the difference from a $10 bottle and $100 bottle. We would have been much more impressed. For dinner, we went to a Russian restaurant. The beef stroganoff was outstanding. Larry ordered the wine; it was pretty fantastic, too.