Day One in Williamsburg

Wednesday, March Eighteenth

The kids who kept us up last night also woke us up early this morning, which did not make for a good start to our first whole day in Williamsburg. My Mom talked to the lady at the front desk, who said she’d upgrade us to a suite and move us to the top floor. She assured us that we would be far away from everyone, not near the stairs, as if we were in our own corner of the world. We hoped it would be true.

Once we finally dragged ourselves out of the hotel, we began walking toward the Colonial Williamsburg Visitors Center, which is about a mile and a half from our hotel. We stopped at a 7-11 on the way for coffee, water, a doughnut, and an apple fritter. Since there were no benches around, we sat on a brick planter near another hotel.
 

We arrived at the Visitors Center and asked some questions about what we should do for the day, considering the fact that the tickets to Colonial Williamsburg aren’t very cheap, and we had already wasted several hours of the day. We also wanted to visit Jamestowne while we’re here in Virginia. After many options were given to us, and we talked to another confusing lady about shuttle buses, we decided to walk to Colonial Williamsburg, go to the few things we could see without purchasing tickets, then skip Jamestowne and buy our Williamsburg tickets for tomorrow at 3:00pm today. The man at the Visitors Center advised us to do this, because you can use those one day tickets for the remaining hours of the day you purchase them. We bought ours at around 3:00, and were able to use them for the rest of the day, and still can use them tomorrow.
 

For lunch, we ate in the basement of Shields Tavern, which had an incredibly cool atmosphere.

After lunch, we walked around some more before getting our tickets. There weren’t too many buildings we could visit without tickets, so part of the time we rested our feet and sat on benches in the cool sunshine.
 

With our tickets, we just visited the courthouse today, and decided to save the rest for tomorrow. We also visited the bakery and got an afternoon snack to enjoy, while watching many busy squirrels scampering about.

We had planned to go to a reenactment of the assembly before the Battle of Yorktown at 5:00pm, behind the courthouse. As we walked out of the bakery backyard close to that time, we got to see the beginning of the military band, consisting of fife and drum. It was beyond cool.
 

The reenactment was so professionally done, and definitely the most awesome one I’ve ever been to. It was as if we had stepped back in time, and were really attending the assembly. They fired artillery and muskets. The artillery shot over a half mile, and the muskets were shot quite inaccurately, but as a volley, and filled the air with as much lead as possible.
 

 

 

George Washington also rode in on a beautiful horse to make a speech. I am so glad we didn’t miss this!

 

 

If you zoom in on the picture below, you'll see that all three men are looking straight at our camera, and one is even smiling for it! I happened to notice this when I was taking the picture, and thought it was pretty funny. We're guessing that they were staring because we had such a long lens on the camera.
 

 

 

Since it was already fairly late, we left right after the reenactment and walked toward the shuttle bus. It took us as far as the Visitors Center, then we walked from there back to our hotel. We walked about five miles today, and I’m glad the weather was so nice!

We ate supper at Rocco’s Smokehouse and Grill, then walked back to the hotel for a relaxing time in the pool and hot tub. On the way back, we noticed a little wooden box that my Mom sarcastically said was a dog or cat house. What do you know, it was a cat house! Inside was a tiny black and white kitty, and beside it sat an orange kitty. By the time we had walked closer to it, the kitty inside the house was hiding behind it, but two other kitties came out of the woods- a long haired black and white, and a gray one. We sat there for a while and tried to get them to come to us, and finally the long haired and gray kitties came toward us, but still kept their distance. They were so small and adorable!