Day 54 - All day in Jamestown and Yorktown, Virginia

What can I say about today? I know! IT WAS FREAKING FANTASTIC!!!! Oh, yeah! And that's probably an understatement.

The reason is that today, at long last, we finally made it to Jamestown. Jamestown where it all began. Jamestown where America got its kick start four hundred years ago. Jamestown that came within mere hours of ceasing to exist, as the final boatload of colonists, the handful that hadn't starved to death by then, boarded a ship and set sail down the James River for home, hoping, I'm sure, that they'd never see the rocky shores of America again.

But even before the starving and bone-tired remnants of what had once been several hundred pioneers reached the open sea, they ran into the long-awaited supply ship headed upriver on the James to save them. Fortunately for the future of America, for you and me, they turned around and went back. It was tough to survive in Jamestown, what with the lack of food, the hostile Native Americans, and the oftentimes severe weather. For the most part, it took more skill than those early colonists possessed.

In the beginning what they really lacked was skilled tradesmen and farmers. Many of the original colonists had been adventure seekers and little else. Some were even so called "gentlemen" who weren't used to doing manual labor. Others were soldiers. A few were women and children. A very large percentage of these people died, as many as 80% in the first few years. In all, between the years 1607 and 1624, six thousand colonists came ashore at Jamestown. Only about half managed to survive.

Today's excursion into the world of four hundred years ago included Jamestown Village, a sort of working re-creation of life in that famous colonial village. The village property contained a super nice museum and a couple of sailing ships similar to what would have delivered the colonists to America and later brought them supplies. We also visited a working Indian village and a replica fort enclosure where docents demonstrated period correct crafts that you would see in colonial times.

Though I like museums, I'm much more fond of docent recreations of vintage crafts and life ways. A matchlock weapon hanging in a display case is nice, but a matchlock weapon in the hands of a trained shooter is sublime (photo above).

In the Indian village, Concetta got to experience both rope-making using yucca fibers, and boat-making using fire and the sharp edges of oyster shells. You can't beat that hands-on stuff for really acquainting us with what the original artists had to go through in order to produce their crafts.

When we walked out to the sailing ships I really got a thrill. Having lived aboard an ocean-going vessel for a year of my life, I really like seeing how other sailors coped with life aboard ship. I was interested to see that the bunks aboard the vessel were roughly the same size as the one I slept in aboard the sixty-foot vessel where I lived. I guess things don't change all that much in four hundred years.

After our morning touring the Jamestown Village we had lunch in the RV then set off for the real Jamestown archaeological site. This is the part for which I and Concetta had long been waiting. Naturally I was hoping that we'd get to see some digging in progress, but alas we were disappointed.

Still, the talk by the resident ranger was very, very informative and the accompanying museum of archeological finds from the property was outstanding. We even got to see some facial reconstruction of a couple of the finds, which allowed us to go from the skull to a near perfect likeness of the person. Though no photographs were allowed in the museum, I can tell you that everything is displayed in a simple, straight-forward way and you don't get overloaded reading the background material.

At this point, even though the day was swiftly coming to an end, we decided to dash over and see the Yorktown exhibit if it were possible to do so. Unfortunately, we only caught the last forty-five minutes of the National Parks Yorktown Museum, though the background movie being shown was wonderful and gave us a good understanding of the surrender of the British there in 1781. As we were exiting we discovered that even though the Park Service visitor center and museum were closing, the grounds were not. Even better, we learned that the grounds included the actually original village of Yorktown which you could walk to from where our rig was parked.

So, as the last vestiges of the day filtered through the trees, Concetta and I walked the old village of Yorktown just appreciating the quaint old houses bathed in the most wonderful afternoon light and it was almost like a fairytale village. Being as it was a Sunday afternoon, there was almost no people around and very little traffic (people actually live there we found). It was just a great way to end the day.

With the help of our trusty, but sometimes cantakerous GPS, we swiftly found our way back to our camp ground and the space that we had reserved for three nights. Not counting the abundance of campfire smoke, the inexplicable over abundance of four-footed burglar alarms nearby, and ridiculous distance to the trash dumpsters, we really like this camp. It's called "American Heritage" of all things, and you can find us in space 47 near the woods. Concetta says that we're going to try and do some laundry while we're here, but I'm betting that I'll be keeping her much too busy for that chore since tomorrow we're bound for Colonial Williamsburg, yet another historic location we've been dying to see.

After that, who knows? I'm thinking Gettysburg, but you know that anything is possible.