Williamsburg Day 3: Jamestown and Friends

Before I continue, let me make it clear that I’m not spending my time searching for Wi-Fi spots… we discovered that the Comfort Inn across the street from our hotel has a strong enough wireless signal that covers the 150yrd radius!

Today was our visit to Jamestown, which was the first permanent settlement in America by the Brits. The whole set up was similar to Williamsburg, except this time there were a bunch of Indians involved. The majority of the exhibit is outdoors, with lots of recreated tee-pees and huts and all that jazz. The Indian stuff was sort of boring, but we managed to get some sweet pictures of chickens.

Mom started to say, “These Indians were so smart with their architecture.” That’s when Danny and I both said, “No way!” At the same time these Native Americans were building these shoddy huts out of sticks, the Japanese were building castles without any nails whatsoever. Sheesh. So after checking out the Indian stuff, we moved on to the actual Jamestown fort/settlement, which was fairly interesting.

The rest of the day was spent in Colonial Williamsburg. If you’ve ever been to a colonial re-creation settlement (there are bunches of them in PA) this is pretty much exactly the same. The only exception is that Williamsburg has this weird section on the outskirts of town that I refer to as Colonial Limbo. It’s a weird group of buildings that look and feel colonial, but house modern stores like Barnes and Noble or various overly priced restaurants. Of course, this was my favorite part, even though it is rather disorienting and inexplicable.

Williamsburg is split up into two parts, the free stuff and the pay stuff. The pay stuff requires you to get a pass that costs upwards of $48 a person and this pass lets you in to certain buildings. It’s kind of a rip off, considering that the buildings include the capitol, the governor’s building, and some other random ones like the gunsmith. Of course, we all voted (much to Mom’s chagrin) to avoid paying this exorbitant amount and just take what we could get for free.

We walked up and down the main street of Williamsburg all the way to the capitol. Along the way we stopped in the various stores and parlors… I was unaware of this, my American AP class in high school definitely left this out, but apparently colonial stores has bitter cold air conditioning. Holy cow! It was quite a shocker to go from 98 degrees outside into 45 degrees in the blacksmith’s place.

Once we got to the capitol building, we couldn’t get in without a pass… so Dad employed his Rubino charm and taught us all another important life lesson: the power of assumption can save you money. “Just take what you saw in the secretary’s building, and imagine the capitol being more of the same.” By assuming we know what the inside looks like, we don’t have to spend the money on the passes! Ingenious!