(Good morning, dear ones! 🙂 The sun is shining brilliantly in Cancun and I’m finally relaxing. 🙂 Yesterday I got to swim down an UNDERGROUND river!!! Can’t wait to tell you all about my adventures. 🙂 Miss you muchly!)
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When I was a little girl I wanted desperately to live in the “olden days.” I didn’t much care which era, just as long as it involved adventure of some sort, and the opportunity to live off the land. I wanted to chop wood and milk cows and sleep under a bear skin. It all sounded very romantic and swashbuckling to my inexperienced self.
Nowadays I know better. I know the difficulties they experienced living far from civilization and all the protection, medical care, and social interaction it provided. But I confess I still get a hankering now and then to weave my own cloth on a loom, make butter in a churn, and get maple syrup right out of the tree.
This weekend I got to visit Fort Nisqually on Point Defiance. My friend Stacey knows I’m a crazy, history fanatic, so she let me drag her away from stunning ocean views to enter the walled enclosure and take a visual tour of a time when soldiers, adventurers and a few families left their comfortable worlds to create a new one in the wilderness at the height of the fur trade.
Fort Nisqually was a Hudson’s Bay Company outpost built in 1833, and was the first European settlement on Puget Sound. It employed laborers from America, England, French Canada, Hawaii, Ireland, Native American tribes, and Scotland, and became a thriving center of trade and agriculture.
It is now a living history museum where volunteers and staff, in period clothing, demonstrate the crafts of the 19th century and engage visitors in historic dialogue. Admission is $6 and allows you to wander through a general store, blacksmith shop, laundry and numerous other interesting buildings.
I enjoyed it immensely, picturing myself puttering away in the gardens, airing out the Hudson Bay blankets, or perhaps spending a cozy evening in the parlor of the main house playing cards by the light of an oil lamp.
Did you ever wish you could live in a different time in history? Which one?
Oh dear, that is pretty difficult question for me to answer, because I seem to enjoy my life at this very moment. I don’t think I can imagine live in those era, lol.
I have always been drawn to to the 18th century where I could wear a bustle and long swishing skirts. I know that there are many drawbacks to living in this time, but knights, chivalry and secret gardens still appeal to me.
Every time I read Edith Wharton…
I’m always a bit torn with this romantic illusion, but know what you mean. I love the idea of experiencing what we think is “the simple life” but I suspect its darn hard work. I’ve decided if I had to pick a fantasy of living in another era it would be where I lived in a very posh English “upstairs” mansion with servants galore who looked after the crystal glasses & chilled wine aspects of my sitting in front of a roaring log fire fantasy 🙂 Can’t wait to hear more about your Cancun adventure. Enjoy!