Charlottesville Part 2: In the Land of Jefferson

I am a slacker.  I feel as though I am performing Herculean tasks by balancing a full-time job, motherhood, marriage, friends, family.

But then we visited Monticello and UVA and felt like a ginormous slacker.  Thomas Jefferson was an industrious fella.  His resume highlights read:

• Helped found a nation
• President 
• Jotted down some thoughts on life and liberty in that little document called the Declaration of Independence
• Governor of Virginia
• Founded of the University of Virginia
• Minister to France

{I know what you're thinking, we don't visit "Lil' G" for a history lesson.  Pictures of Adelaide!  Pictures of Adelaide!  Alright, settle down, I hear ya.}

Monticello, meaning "little mountain" in Italian, sits atop a mountain just outside of Charlottesville.  While unfortunately we couldn't take pictures inside, the view outside was pretty spectacular:

While Jefferson wasn't building Monticello, drafting the Declaration of Independence, serving as POTUS, or sparring with Paul Giamatti... er, um, John Adams, he was busy constructing the University of Virginia, one of the first public universities in the country.  Jefferson wrote that he wanted to build a university that would draw students "to come and drink of the cup of knowledge and fraternize with us."  


We came to drink from the cup of knowledge.  And to fraternize, but that's a different blog post.

UVA's campus is everything a college campus should be:  red brick buildings, white columns, tall trees, and wide lawns for lounging and discussing philosophy {or making out with your sophomore year boyfriend}.  UVA's campus so embodies the look of an American university that I'm pretty sure if you looked up "college" in the dictionary, a picture of UVA would be next to it.

Above, Bryan was checking out the dorms around the lawn at the center of campus, where the rock-star students get to live.  How cool is that?

The one disappointment of the visit was this:

Adelaide slept through her first college tour.  :(  How does she expect to get a viola scholarship if she doesn't pay attention?