Williamsburg--Another Not GWT

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  Williamsburg, Virginia
Monday, April 21, 2008

     Historical Williamsburg, Virginia.  This trip is also not the Great Western Trip coming to this blog June 27,  but it was a fun little trip.  It's one of our get away trips.  We have gone here many times since we discovered it when Brian was around 10 or so.  I went with his school trip as a parent chaperon.  The kids didn't like it outstandingly, but I did.  I thought it was a wonderland of history.  I love having history told to me with visuals.  Williamsburg also has all the other attributes that make it a favorite of ours--good food and exercise to work off the good food in the form of walking or biking around. 
     This year is the 400 year anniversary of Jamestown, the first English settlement in America in 1607.  It's an easy 9 mile bike trip from Williamsburg, which is what I did while H was working away at a conference.  We have been going to Jamestown so long now that we actually met and talked to Bill Kelso, the archaeologist who decided that the original fort was not in the James River but still on the land, before he had made his first dig about 15 years ago and was just plotting out what he was going to do.  We have gone back over the years and each time they have learned so much.  The theories they told us in the beginning turn out not to be true at all and new theories have replaced them.  For instance, we first learned that so many of the first colonists died because they didn't know how to catch the fish like the native Americans did.  Not true at all.  They had plenty of fish.  What they didn't know that the Native Americans knew when they got to that point in May 1607 was that the James River is a tidal river.  It was 'sweet' in May because of the mountain snow melt but in the summer it turns salty as the Chesapeake Bay salt water pushes back upstream.  They didn't dig a well and by the time they figured this out they were too weak to build one.  The real story is always so much more interesting than the ones they had told us the last time.
     It's not a cheap trip.  If you stay in the Williamsburg Historic area which we always like to do, rooms are over $100. a night.  A meal in one of the historic taverns will cost close to $100 for two with one glass of wine each and tip.  But it is so worth it.  It is worth being able to park the car and never get back in for the time you are there.  Makes you feel more in the spirit of the 17th & 18th century.    And right off the historic area still in walking distance is an area of shopping and dining experiences that are also very good.  We often go, as we did this time, to the Trellis Restaurant and had 'Death by Chocolate'.  If you don't like history but you like chocolate the trip will have been worth it.
     If there were only another way to get there then driving interstate 95!!!

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