Finishing our tour of Ash Lawn-Highland, home of President James Monroe, you can’t miss this 250-year-old tree known as the Monroe Oak. Seriously, it’s a really cool tree. You may need to see it in person to appreciate its size, with a 20-foot circumference! This tree even had its own blog on the Ash Lawn website.

We started our trip heading to Charlottesville and the campus of the University of Virginia, historic in itself, but our real purpose was food, specifically bread ends and House Dressing, a specialty of the Cheese Shop in Williamsburg, Virginia where I went to college. I knew a sandwich shop near the UVA campus, the Take It Away Sandwich Shop, also had this “delicacy,” a tangy tub of mayonnaise and bread. After securing our tub of mayonaissey goodness, Julie and I proceeded UVA’s famous lawn (in the shadow of Mr. Jefferson’s Rotunda) for a picnic and preparation for our three days of “nerdvana.”