Hermione & the Spirit of Lafayette Back in the US

Nope, I’m not talking about a Hermione Granger, the Harry Potter character, but Hermione, the Frigate of Freedom, a ship. The replica of the ship that brought the Marquis de Lafayette to the United State some 235 years ago to carry the message from King Louis XVI that France was going to aid the colonies. In 1997, a group of people came up with the idea of reconstructing the frigate using the same building methods applied in the original. Some 17 years later, on April 18, 2015, she left Rochefort in France to set sail for Virginia and retrace a journey through American history. For the past month, L’Hermione plied across the Atlantic, retracing Lafayette’s journey. She’s set to arrive in Yorktown, Virginia, this week and then sail up the Coast to 11 additional ports. If you’re hoping to catch the ship, here’s her schedule:

• Yorktown, Virginia (June 5-7)
• Mount Vernon, Virginia (June 9 – not docking)
• Alexandria, Virginia (June 10-12)
• Annapolis, Maryland (June 16-17)
• Baltimore, Maryland (June 19-21)
• Philadelphia, Pennsylvania (June 25-28)
• New York, New York (July 1-4)
• Greenport, New York (July 6-7)
• Newport, Rhode Island (July 8-9)
• Boston, Massachusetts (July 11-12)
• Castine, Maine (July 14-15)
• Lunenburg, Nova Scotia (July 18)

At each stops, there will be a traveling photography exhibit covering the 17 years of the ship’s reconstruction and visitors will be able to tour the ship and enjoy other pier-side cultural activities. As always, New York gets the best stop of all, the one on July 4th, with a whole parade of boats that will accompany the Hermione as she sails from the Verrazano Bridge to the Statue of Liberty. Then of course, there’ll be fireworks, but I think those would have happened regardless 😉 I wish I could make it to that, but I’m hoping to catch the ship in Philadelphia since I’ll be out of town on a work trip pretty much the entire time it’s going to be in the DC-area. 

For more information on L’Hermione and her transatlantic trip, check out the website Hermione Voyage or follow her journey on instagram and twitter. The photograph used in this post was courtesy of L’Hermione.