The Slower Road

Yesterday evening, we gathered for a dinner / party to celebrate the CAA’s 50th anniversary …

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After dinner, Colonel Davis and then Ken Wheeling and then other members stood up to recount stories and tell everyone what they have enjoyed most about the CAA; Richard Nicoll (shown here) shared a funny story of how he was apprenticed to Tom Ryder

As you’ve gathered by now, today was the first full day at this year’s International Carriage Symposium.

Rather than try to recap today’s outstanding lectures, I encourage you to review some of the highlights here. Or, better yet, follow me on Twitter! Then you’ll be able to keep up with my “live tweeting” during the remaining two days of the symposium.

Just a couple of photos from this afternoon:

Mark Schneider wins the award, I think, for the best entrance of all the speakers so far. He’s an interpreter here at Colonial Williamsburg and he usually portrays Frenchmen. To begin his talk, he strode dramatically into the room (in costume) and, just as dramatically, began his introduction in fluent French. He was speaking about a 1744 book called Le Parfait Cocher, or The Perfect Coachman, and he was clearly channeling the book’s eighteenth-century author. Immediately, a multitude of cell-phone cameras started clicking, and Andres Furger (a fellow speaker) stood up to record the proceedings.

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After the day’s final speaker, everyone gathered in the trade fair room, first to admire and then to queue up for a piece of cake, which the hotel had kindly provided in honor of the CAA’s fiftieth anniversary.

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everyone admired the three-dimensional wheels on the chocolate carriage

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… we’re faced this morning with a mostly empty room in the Williamsburg Lodge. Most of the tables, etc. are in place, and we (and others) will be setting up trade-fair booths, the registration table, tonight’s welcome reception, etc.

And I realized, late last night / early this morning, that I totally neglected to post anything yesterday. Sorry for the lapse.

Yesterday was a rather full travel day for several of us. Katharine and I drove to our little Lexington airport, waited for our flight, flew to Charlotte, ate a late lunch and waited some more, flew to Richmond, and then waited for Ken to arrive on his later flight, as he was the one who’d rented the car. We had a fourth person joining us for the drive, plus all our luggage, of course. And that’s when we started playing “Goldilocks and the Three Bears.” The first rental car that we thought was ours, parked as it was in the correct space, was probably big enough but wouldn’t open. The car next to it, which kept flashing its lights as we tried to open the first car, turned out to be the one we had the keys for. But it was much, much too small … the largest among our pile of suitcases wouldn’t even fit in the “trunk.” So we got a larger car, and all four of us and all of our luggge fit into that one. Success! And away we went.

As I’ve mentioned, today is set-up day, and the symposium begins in earnest tomorrow, with the first lecture at 9:00 a.m.

Tomorrow, we’ll be on our way to Colonial Williamsburg for the third International Carriage Symposium, hosted by the Carriage Association of America and the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation. For the remainder of this week, you’ll be able to catch symposium highlights here on the blog, on the CAA’s Facebook page, and on my Twitter account.

If you’re wondering what this is all about, click here to see the brochure for this year’s event (the speakers and their lecture topics are on the second page), and click on “CAA/CWF Symposia” in the blog topics (at the right) to scroll back through reports and photos from the second International Carriage Symposium, in 2010.

Stay tuned!