Williamsburg

Last Saturday was day two of our adventure with Nana and the day we went to Williamsburg.  While I have pretty much only glowing reviews of Jamestown, we had a mixed experience at Williamsburg.  Some of it was fun, but admission cost 3x that of Jamestown and it was definitely not 3x as fun.  While I would be happy to go to Jamestown again soonish (like in a year or so), I think we'll wait a bit on Williamsburg.  There was a lot of history to learn and wonderful people working there who were very talkative and knowledgeable, but far fewer hands-on activities.  I thought that by going on a Saturday that everything would be open and going on, but it turns out the kid oriented hands-on activities run every day of the week except Saturdays and Tuesdays.  Boo.

It was still fun though and at the end of the day, we left happy (and hot and sweaty, but happy).

We started the morning with the storming of the governor's palace.  Mom and I envisioned torches and banging and yelling.  Turns out there was walking and arguing and diffusion of tensions.  A little disappointing, yes.  However, the events that precipitated the storming (the governor moving all the gun powder out of town in the middle of the night) was an example of how the fears of the British (would there be more uprisings after Boston?) fueled the fears of the colonists (are the British trampling our rights?) which fueled the fears of the British (are the people of Williamsburg really going to attack me and my family in the governor's palace?) and so on and so forth.

After we "stormed" the palace, we got in line to take a tour of the palace.  We were told by our guide (very much in character) that we were only going to get a tour because the governor's family had fled the night before and there was no knowing when they would return.  Inside we got to check out all the weapons.  Guns and swords on the walls.  Very impressive, but apparently none of the servants were trained to use them and the gun powder was kept on the other side of town so they were more for show.

There were many interesting rooms and things to see, so of course I am posting a picture of the predecessor of the modern toilet.

After a tour of the palace, Mom and I headed over to the kitchens to take a look at what was for dinner.  It didn't look too bad except for the fact that it was made a couple of days ago.  We were warned not to partake and if that warning wasn't enough, the number of flies enjoying the spread would have convinced us to move on.

We also visited the gardens where the boys discovered that wooden buckets are heavy even when empty.

On my Mom's side of the family, we are descendants of loyalists.  Here are Michael and Ben showing their pride.

I took the boys over to the weaver's where they all immediately got bored.  I thought it was interesting to see how they turned wool into thread and dyed it, but apparently the boys could care less.

The church where there are still services held today.  In that respect, Williamsburg leads a strange double life.  While many of the buildings are part of Colonial Williamsburg's historical park, some of the homes on the same street and in between exhibit stops are private homes where people still live today.  I don't envy them their location that regard.

Next stop, shoemaker.  Men's shoes only.  Ben was fascinated by this process for a much longer period of time than the rest of us could handle the non-air conditioned enclosed space.

Michael was just confused about the shoe molds.

At this point we took a break and just hung out on the green.  Although the day was not extremely hot by Virginia summer standards, it was still hot and muggy.  Our outdoor activities this time of year tend to be those in the shade or water, so none of us were used to standing and walking around in the sun for that long.  This turned out to be a great choice though, as a little while longer we were in a perfect position to watch the fife and drum bands come marching by.

 Regardless, we were running out of steam.  Taking a look at the map, we decided that the military encampment and armory were our best bets to keep the boys interested, but that we should just do those two and head on out.  Luckily, we found the stocks on our way to the encampment and locked up everyone who had been naughty.  Sadly, I forgot to pack rotten vegetables to throw at them.

We also saw the leader of all of the fife and drum corps on our way to the encampment and he was kind enough to let us take a picture with him.

The military encampment turned out to be a great choice.  There were four stations and two of those involved weapons - for the win!  We started out learning about soldiers' rations.  Sounds like they got plenty to eat while at camp, but the meat this soldier showed us was enough to make me reconsider vegetarianism (but not for long really, this baby LOVES meat).

Station two involved yet another musket demonstration.  Jason sacrificed his hearing to get this shot.

Station three involved being trained by a sergeant who continually called this ragtag group "Awkward Company".  He had them form two (somewhat) straight lines and then had all the shorter people come in the front.  This cut down on the chances of them being shot by someone behind them, but also significantly increased their chances of being shot by someone opposite of them.  Doesn't pay to be short, apparently.

This sergeant relished his roll and did a great job of yelling and belittling his troops (nothing horribly rude and never the littlest ones).

But Ben did not really appreciate being yelled at and was far too young to catch on to how funny it really was, so we extracted him and he was very content to watch the proceedings safely out of the line of sight of the sergeant.

Sadly, I put the camera away before he trained the "soldiers" on how to bayonet each other (from a safe distance), but I did get them ready to shoot the enemy.

The last station was two teenagers teaching us about the fife and drum and how they were used for communication in and out of battle.  Then we checked out the sleeping arrangements for the troops.  This tent housed six men.  It would appear that it also might not pay to be very tall either.

Lastly, we headed over to the armory where, much to the disappointment of three boys, there were no weapons.  It was all good though.  One air conditioned bus ride back to the visitor's center later and we were at the car and headed home.  We really had a fantastic weekend and hopefully the boys have some great memories.

Jamestown

 A few months ago, the boys had birthdays.  Around that time, Mom and I started talking about birthday present ideas.  We have a bunch of stuff and the boys were in a phase where they were likely to ask for only Pokemon cards.  We have HUNDREDS of those already.  Not to mention that that sort of thing comes and goes - if you were to ask them today they would all only want Bey Blades.  And we have LOTS of those already.

So, Mom and I discussed an activity rather than toy options.  First we came up with the idea of tubing on the Potomac (have I mentioned that my mother very much prefers water activities over mountain activities?).  However, two out of the three boys were not keen on that idea.  I really liked the idea at first, although now that I am further along in this pregnancy I question my ability to get in and out of a tube with any sort of grace.  Then we discussed Jamestown or Williamsburg.  Nice day trip.  Mom wanted to do both, however, so it turned into a nice 2-day trip.  Hooray!

This last Friday was Jamestown.  Nana came over Thursday night we could get an early start.  We woke the boys at 5:30am and piled into the car for the drive down.  We arrived just as it was opening.

We bypassed the museum, figuring that we should visit that air conditioned part of Jamestown in the afternoon when it was hot (and muggy, let us never forget muggy when we are talking about Virginia in the summer), and went straight to the Powhatan Village.  Jamestown is full of great hands-on experiences that are geared towards kids.

The boys worked on a dugout canoe.

Josh got to play the part of a deer during hunt training.  The Powhatan took archery pretty seriously.  The boys would get their first bow and arrow at about Ben's age and then were nagged by their mom's to practice.  Sound familiar?

Josh also worked on crushing corn.  Every house had this sort of set up outside and I think Josh used all of them.  He did have to wait his turn though, as there was a local squirrel who was partaking of the good stuff whenever there wasn't a tourist too close by.

Michael and Ben took a nice nap on some animal furs.  I think they touched every animal fur they could reach.  We were surprised to learn that the British settlers coveted skunk furs as there were no skunks in the Old World.

 And the boys scrapped the fur off of a hide (deer?).  It was great - there was nothing they couldn't touch.

Next we went to go see the boats.  I mean, ships.  The interpreters always gave me a vaguely irritated look when I called the Susan Constant, Discovery and Godspeed "boats".  Oops.

The boats, er ships, are really fun to climb around on.  We went below to check out the cannons.  By the way, in case you were wondering, this trip was all about guns and cannons as far as the boys were concerned.  Everywhere we went, they were looking for weapons.  Neither Jamestown nor Williamsburg disappointed.

The boys hung out in the captain's cabin.  The bed was just the right size for them, which made me feel bad for the poor captain.

On the pier two gentlemen shot off the swivel gun for their captivated audience.

After a lunch, ice cream and potty break, we all headed up to the Fort for more fun (ie guns).  The boys loved this musket demonstration and Jason honed his photography skills by working on good pictures of smoke. 

Another gun.

Jason became a pikeman for brief time.  Josh was, sadly, too short to participate.  We were informed for the first, but not last, time that being the guy in the front was not great for longevity (more about that at Williamsburg).

The boys tried on some armor and gave us their fiercest scowls.  We may need to work on our scowling, although you may have noticed that our tweenager did the best job.  That may have to do with already having the most practice....

 Then the soldiers made sure this young ruffian did his chores.

And lastly, we we hung out with the blacksmith who taught us that the temperatures of metal are black, red, orange, and white.  Black being the most dangerous as the metal could be room temperature or 200 degrees.

It was a fun day and to make it even more exciting, the hotel had a POOL.  After unpacking the car and watching a half an hour of cartoons that we don't have at home (thank you, hotel cable), Jason took the boys to the pool while my body took a few hours to recover from the heat.  The boys had a blast.  Life really couldn't get any better from their perspective.  And then we got BBQ for dinner that came with Oreos and they could have died happy.

Pirate's Cove

Yesterday's adventure was a trip to Pirate's Cove water park.  We had initially planned on going earlier in the summer, as in before the other local school districts let out for the summer, but had to alter our plans a bit when Opa had his heart attack.  Turns out he was fine (well, as fine as you could be with a heart attack), but we wanted to be available in case anyone needed anything or in case Dad was up for having visitors.  So, thus it was that with less than two weeks before our county goes back to school, we finally made it to the water park and met up with cousins for a day of water fun.

And it was fun.  There was this lovely playground, bigger slides, wading pool for the 6 and under crowd, sand pit, and a deeper water section where the kids could cannonball and jump into the water to their hearts' content.

The older boys had a marvelous time playing with their cousins.  I am not sure what they were all doing here, but there was generally a lot of running and chasing and splashing going on.

Ben took a while to warm up to the idea of water, but once he was in the pool with a life jacket on, he was good to go.

There were also these huge slides that were, surprisingly, not a huge draw for the boys, but Michael gave them glowing reviews even though he only went down twice.

I think they actually spent the majority of the time jumping off the side of the pool (Michael and P shown below).

All in all another successful day of water fun.

If I had to do it again (which we probably won't for a while because of the new addition), I would go closer to the date we had originally planned before all the other schools got out.  It was crazy busy with several camp groups filling the pool.  And, entirely by coincidence, Michael's swim shirt was a similar color to the shirts worn by one of the groups, so it was more difficult to pick him out in the crowd.  We spent about 3.5 hours there and the boys probably could have gone longer, but I wasn't feeling great and both Jason and I were completely overstimulated by the amount of kids and noise.  Plus, we were looking at hitting some pretty horrible rush hour traffic on the trip home had we stayed longer.

Sherando Lake

The boys (okay, well, mostly Michael) have been begging to go to a beach this summer.  We went to the Outer Banks a few years ago and they were hooked.  Last summer we went to Lake Anna and had a nice time, but were looking to go somewhere different this year.  So when some friends of ours who moved away (sniff, sniff) invited us meet them at Sherando Lake yesterday,  it was the perfect chance to see them and hit up a beach this summer.

Sherando Lake was marvelous.  It combined the best of all worlds: shady, grassy area for parents to sit and supervise AND nice beach area and shallow water area for plenty of playing AND there was an island to swim (or have Jason pull you) out to.  The boys had a great time with their buds and I got to catch up with a good friend.  The weather was lovely (high of 84 - I am having a hard time hating Virginia as much as I usually do in the summer) and we spent 5 1/2 hours on the beach.  Which, by my calculations, means that we should have applied sunblock about 4 times.  Emphasis on the should have.  Let's just say that the first thing we did when we got home was to break out the aloe and leave it at that.  Other than that, the boys were in agreement that this was "one of the best days ever."

Ben hanging out in the shade and taking his time committing to playing on the beach.

Josh mistaking a boogie board for a surf board.

Michael pretending he is about to throw sand on me.  At least, I hope he was just pretending before I warned him that would be a poor choice.

Ben and L doing something in the sand.

Lovely mountains around Sherando Lake.

Jason and our boys and G and her boys all swam/were pulled over to the little island.

L, Michael, H and Ben hanging out on their bellies in the sand.