Frontier Culture Museum

Last week, my teaching assignment was in Rockingham County. Most of you Virginians will know Rockingham as the location of James Madison University, but I know it now as the location of Plains Elementary School where the children were very pleasant and a lot of fun. This was just an overnight trip--one day for travel, and one day for teaching. I had no teaching partner, and decided to stop by the Frontier Culture Museum on my way to the hotel on my travel day. The Frontier Culture Museum is a place that I've been very interested in going to for quite some time and I had a few hours to kill before I could check in my my hotel. It is another state-run living history museum but it has way more sites than either Jamestown Settlement or Yorktown Victory Center. They have recreated an English farm house, a German farm house, an Irish farm house, an American farm house, and a forge. BUT they have ten total interpreters, for all sites 7 days a week. That just blows my mind. It has the potential to be a really fantastic place but the budget crunch has obviously hurt the museum greatly. I had a great time walking around--it was quite a bit of optional walking. There was a golf cart that would come around about every 15 minutes to shuttle you off to other sites, but I opted to walk. That means that I opted for a pretty hefty uphill hike from the American farm to the parking lot and that counted for my exercise for the day!

There were a lot of neat animals:
This guy started walking towards me realllllly quickly and it made me nervous! I snapped the picture and got the heck out of there. He was huge.

This is a German chicken. Crazy looking!

And a really eager pig who followed me as I walked around his pen. Adorable!!


And the beautiful scenery as I walked around the sites...



Another bonus to my Rockingham County trip: Dave's little brother James goes to JMU and I was able to meet up with him for dinner. It was SO much fun and so nice of him to come out to dinner with me, so I didn't have to worry about being by myself.