We went to Williamsburg, VA for our family's summer vacation this year (Maddy's pick over the beach as long as we got a hotel with a pool) and all three of us were total history dorks as we spent four days exploring Colonial Williamsburg, Jamestown, and Yorktown. The entire area is gorgeous land and has been preserved or rebuilt beautifully. It was family time that none of us will be forgetting for a long time.
We went to Colonial Williamsburg first. We are independent tourists, so we didn't track down a guide or join any kind of group. We just set off on a mission to discover whatever we could before we couldnt stand our stomachs growling for dinner anymore! The above picture is the oldest church.
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| Maddy and I in the stockade (man, we look like two sad chicas!) |
The second day we went to Jamestown. Once there you can go to the historic section (the original place where the first settlement was created), you can go to the glasshouse and watch them make glass pitchers, vases, jugs, etc... or you can go to Jamestown Settlement where they have rebuilt a settlement for you to see what it would be like to live back then.
We visited Historic Jamestown first and explored how the first settlers lived. We learned that our first settlers were big bullies! They held the Indians up at gunpoint, demanding their crops. When the Indians refused, the English settlers burned their crops to the ground. This, in turn, caused the Indians to retaliate (DUH) and shoot at the English settlers any time they left their fort. Since the English couldn't leave their fort for food, they turned to eating their livestock, then the soles of their shoes, and then the GROSSIEST thing - they dug up their dead and ate them :-( ewwwww!
Next we were off to the Jamestown to see what it would have been like to live back then. Maddy was determined to go inside of each and every hut (Dan and I just stood back and watched for part of this activity - if you have seen one hut, you have seen them all! haha)
Watching the Blacksmith was interesting - he was in the process of making nails and answering this little boy's million questions (whoo, he was making that blacksmith earn his paycheck that day LOL). He told us that back then, there was a "smith" for everything. If you wanted an ax made, you went to an ax smith, if you wanted a nail made, you went to a nail smith, etc..... you get the picture. The job of a blacksmith was not to make and create items, but to fix broken items that needed repair. Anyone know that?
I LOVE this picture - we went on the driving tour of the Yorktown battlefields and Maddy wanted me to take her pic. What I cannot wait to do is take a picture of our chocolate lab, Bay Leigh, looking exactly like this and then make a collage with the two pics! It will be priceless :-)
Maddy has this thing with statues (this point was illustrated in a previous blog post from our weekend in Pittsburgh Won't You be my Neighbor? ) It didnt matter that this guy was burning her fingertips because of the sun beating down on him all afternoon, she needed to pose and get a picture to last a lifetime.
What does Harry Potter 7 have to do with our vacation this summer? We were on vacation on opening night and needed to find a theater fast - lo and behold, we found the best place EVER: The Movie Tavern
The closest one to us? Williamsburg, VA :-(
It is a restaurant inside of a movie theater. So for the price of a movie in Chambersburg Cinema plus dinner (also moderately normal prices) we sat in style (high backed leather desk seats), ate a YummO dinna, and closed the epic Harry Potter saga in the best possible way! Life is good :-)
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