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Williamsburg travelogue, Day 2.
I think I made a tactical error and started writing up today's travel too late. I'm very tired. We had an awful time getting Alex to sleep last night, and then I woke a lot during the night. I hate forced-air heat - it always leaves me parched. I am spoiled by our radiators at home.
The day went well, though. Alex woke me up early, and we cuddled in bed for a while and then went down for the free hotel breakfast, of which the make-your-own Belgian waffles were pretty much the only high point. We showered, dressed, and arrived at Colonial Williamsburg at 9:30. We decided to buy two-day tickets, figuring that it would allow us a more leisurely tour, so I hope the weather report is correct and it isn't going to rain tomorrow.
We walked around the main street for a while, admiring the beautifully restored (and tiny) colonial houses, chatting with a couple of costumed interpreters including a funny older gentleman who showed off his cowhorn ear trumpet, and visiting a shop that sold beautiful silver trinkets. We were waiting for a show at one of the taverns, a half-hour lecture/performance which explained the roles and operations of theatrical companies in the colonies. We all enjoyed this, especially when they acted some snippets of an 18th century farce called The Clandestine Marriage.
We continued to walk around the town after the performance. We spent some time in the silversmith's workshop, where we watched a young woman making a ring and an older woman beating out a silver cup with a hammer. They spoke interestingly about their work, and a third silversmith, a man, explained how silver goods were used as money - that a tradesman might chisel off a piece of one of your silver spoons, for example, if you owed less silver than the whole spoon. I was interested to learn that women commonly worked in skilled trades and shops in colonial America - I had had the impression that they didn't. We spent quite a bit of time watching them, despite the discomfort from their roaring fire. Then we walked on up the street and visited the gaol, shuddering to think about how dark and cold and barren the cells must have been. Fascinatingly, and disgustingly, the cells had indoor latrines, which I suppose makes sense. The next stop was a Presbyterian meetinghouse, almost equally barren. Alex and I had a long talk about how different their church was from ours, and I reminded her of what we'd read in Little House in the Big Woods about how strict the Sunday rules were. She really relished the idea, and so we spent time sitting on benches being very serious and not moving or making a sound.
By chance, a pair of lost tourists blundered in and told us that the place they were looking for, which turned out to be just up the street, was supposedly great for kids. We soon followed them to the Powell House, which indeed turned out to be wonderful. One room had a set of reproduction 18th-century dolls and toys to play with. Another, set up as a bedroom, had two costumed interpreters teaching children to make sachets and explaining why they made them and how they planned to use them. We were pleasantly surprised when they told Alex she was welcome to climb on the curtained four-poster featherbed. (Now she wants bed curtains.) The kitchen was set up behind the house, in a separate outbuilding. We walked through a yard full of children rolling hoops and playing ninepins into the kitchen, where a wonderful woman was enlisting kids' help making cookies, which she intended to bake in a dutch oven - a tightly-lidded iron pot which had hot coals underneath it and covering the lid. Alex helped roll and cut out cookies while Michael and I poked around looking at kitchen implements and reproductions of food. (Mmm, syllabub.) Then Alex was sent out to feed the chickens, which I think was one of the high points of her day.
Next stop was the gunsmith's. Michael had the most to talk about there, as the gunsmith showed him the equipment they used to rifle gun barrels. They had a beautiful long rifle available for visitors to handle, which he said had taken about 400 man-hours of labor. After we visited the shop, Michael and Alex ran about in the yard while I sat down on a bench by the gate to rest. I fell into conversation with a woman there, one of the costumed interpreters, and asked her about a sign I'd seen outside the apothecary's shop on the main street - which surprised me because it listed, among their services, midwifery. "Well," she told me vehemently. "You don't want a man-midwife unless you can possibly avoid it." She went on to explain that apothecaries and physicians delivered babies as a last resort, when the situation was desperate, but that most babies were delivered by a female lay midwife. She knew the woman's name and something about her career, and added an anecdote about the British governor's wife choosing to have her ninth child with the female midwife according to local custom, although she was used to male accoucheurs in England. She shocked the locals by insisting on having a man-midwife in the next room just-in-case, which did not seem delicate to them. She finished up by noting that man-midwives performed Cesarean sections, "and we have records of a few women who actually survived them." It was a fascinating conversation. The thing that really blew me away was that she knew all that stuff, even though we were nowhere near the apothecary or any other medical setting. She just knew it.
At this point we were all starving. We went back to the main street and waited for about fifteen minutes for a table in one of the historical taverns. I was interested to see that, although some of the places we'd visited had unobtrusive electric lights, the tavern didn't. Just daylight through the windows and candles on the tables. We had an amazing lunch - crab and shrimp bisque for me followed by a welsh rarebit, and a sandwich of absolutely incredible salty Virginia ham for Michael. (Alex had noodles in butter sauce, so she was happy too.) I also had a tasty bottle of locally-brewed ginger ale. A fiddler moved from room to room playing while we ate. I really wished that I were able to drink alcohol, because they had a number of different historical punch recipes on the menu that I would've wanted to try.
I wanted to see another history/theater performance after we ate. There turned out to be a long line, so we waited perhaps half an hour. Then they brought us into a public room of a non-food-serving tavern in a very small group - perhaps fifteen people - gave us a few words to set the scene (Christmas, 1781), and left us to "overhear" a conversation between two men. The younger had been surrendered to the British, held for a few months on a prison ship, and then paroled and left to walk home from Charleston to Williamsburg, trying to avoid both armies. The older man was asking about his experiences and trying to prepare him for the changes he'd find in Williamsburg. At the end, the younger man's wife hurried in and they were reunited after years of separation. I confess that I got a little teary. Our guide then walked us upstairs to view the sleeping rooms of the tavern, and brought us down a different staircase to another common room where we "overheard" another conversation between a free black man and a slave, discussing the freedman's choice to serve in the Army and the other's contempt for his choice to "waste" his freedom that way. This one felt more anachronistic to me, although maybe I'm displaying my ignorance about 18th-century race relations. I really loved the first vignette, though, and I liked the intimacy of both performances.
We planned to go from there to visit a small plantation, but by the time we got a shuttle bus it was already 3:30 and Alex was really flagging. We knew she'd love the plantation, but figured she'd enjoy it more if she wasn't exhausted and cranky. So instead we went back to the hotel. There Alex played and Michael surfed the net while I took a little nap sitting up on the couch. (I guess she wasn't the only exhausted one.) We didn't do much until dinnertime.
I had made us reservations for a "seafood feast" at one of the official Williamsburg hotels, a modern one with a modern dining room. The buffet was absolutely lovely: the ubiquitous crab bisque, which I didn't mind at all having for the second meal in a row; various antipasti; massive cold displays of shrimp, mussels, raw oysters (oh, did I want some, but I was good), two kinds of smoked salmon, and enormous crab legs served with little cups of melted butter; crab cakes, mustard-encrusted salmon, and a half-dozen other cooked dishes; breads and cheeses; a sushi table with tuna and vegetable rolls and more preserved salmon (alas, no fresh raw salmon); and a cooking station offering fennel-crusted scallops and an unbelievably tasty mussel, mushroom, and spinach pasta. And desserts. We made ourselves a good dinner. Alex tried crab legs for the first time and fell in love. I just loved everything.
We got lost on the way home and saw a lot of pitch-dark scenic Virginia countryside. Oops. Alex was campaigning for a swim before bed, which we had promised her before the unscheduled extra driving. We extorted a promise that she would reward us for an evening swim with an EASY BEDTIME, and she agreed - including adding, to my provisions of "no goofing" and "no fussing" her own promise that "I won't say I'm not sleepy" and "I won't call mom and dad." Such a deal. We took her to the pool for half an hour and then she did go right to sleep. Michael and I took turns reading and sating our internet addiction until our eyelids drooped too.
Tomorrow: the plantation, the blacksmith's shop, a couple of great houses and their kitchens, and the folk art museum, which has a historic toys exhibit I am just salivating over. They have a thirteen-foot-long dollhouse.
The day went well, though. Alex woke me up early, and we cuddled in bed for a while and then went down for the free hotel breakfast, of which the make-your-own Belgian waffles were pretty much the only high point. We showered, dressed, and arrived at Colonial Williamsburg at 9:30. We decided to buy two-day tickets, figuring that it would allow us a more leisurely tour, so I hope the weather report is correct and it isn't going to rain tomorrow.
We walked around the main street for a while, admiring the beautifully restored (and tiny) colonial houses, chatting with a couple of costumed interpreters including a funny older gentleman who showed off his cowhorn ear trumpet, and visiting a shop that sold beautiful silver trinkets. We were waiting for a show at one of the taverns, a half-hour lecture/performance which explained the roles and operations of theatrical companies in the colonies. We all enjoyed this, especially when they acted some snippets of an 18th century farce called The Clandestine Marriage.
We continued to walk around the town after the performance. We spent some time in the silversmith's workshop, where we watched a young woman making a ring and an older woman beating out a silver cup with a hammer. They spoke interestingly about their work, and a third silversmith, a man, explained how silver goods were used as money - that a tradesman might chisel off a piece of one of your silver spoons, for example, if you owed less silver than the whole spoon. I was interested to learn that women commonly worked in skilled trades and shops in colonial America - I had had the impression that they didn't. We spent quite a bit of time watching them, despite the discomfort from their roaring fire. Then we walked on up the street and visited the gaol, shuddering to think about how dark and cold and barren the cells must have been. Fascinatingly, and disgustingly, the cells had indoor latrines, which I suppose makes sense. The next stop was a Presbyterian meetinghouse, almost equally barren. Alex and I had a long talk about how different their church was from ours, and I reminded her of what we'd read in Little House in the Big Woods about how strict the Sunday rules were. She really relished the idea, and so we spent time sitting on benches being very serious and not moving or making a sound.
By chance, a pair of lost tourists blundered in and told us that the place they were looking for, which turned out to be just up the street, was supposedly great for kids. We soon followed them to the Powell House, which indeed turned out to be wonderful. One room had a set of reproduction 18th-century dolls and toys to play with. Another, set up as a bedroom, had two costumed interpreters teaching children to make sachets and explaining why they made them and how they planned to use them. We were pleasantly surprised when they told Alex she was welcome to climb on the curtained four-poster featherbed. (Now she wants bed curtains.) The kitchen was set up behind the house, in a separate outbuilding. We walked through a yard full of children rolling hoops and playing ninepins into the kitchen, where a wonderful woman was enlisting kids' help making cookies, which she intended to bake in a dutch oven - a tightly-lidded iron pot which had hot coals underneath it and covering the lid. Alex helped roll and cut out cookies while Michael and I poked around looking at kitchen implements and reproductions of food. (Mmm, syllabub.) Then Alex was sent out to feed the chickens, which I think was one of the high points of her day.
Next stop was the gunsmith's. Michael had the most to talk about there, as the gunsmith showed him the equipment they used to rifle gun barrels. They had a beautiful long rifle available for visitors to handle, which he said had taken about 400 man-hours of labor. After we visited the shop, Michael and Alex ran about in the yard while I sat down on a bench by the gate to rest. I fell into conversation with a woman there, one of the costumed interpreters, and asked her about a sign I'd seen outside the apothecary's shop on the main street - which surprised me because it listed, among their services, midwifery. "Well," she told me vehemently. "You don't want a man-midwife unless you can possibly avoid it." She went on to explain that apothecaries and physicians delivered babies as a last resort, when the situation was desperate, but that most babies were delivered by a female lay midwife. She knew the woman's name and something about her career, and added an anecdote about the British governor's wife choosing to have her ninth child with the female midwife according to local custom, although she was used to male accoucheurs in England. She shocked the locals by insisting on having a man-midwife in the next room just-in-case, which did not seem delicate to them. She finished up by noting that man-midwives performed Cesarean sections, "and we have records of a few women who actually survived them." It was a fascinating conversation. The thing that really blew me away was that she knew all that stuff, even though we were nowhere near the apothecary or any other medical setting. She just knew it.
At this point we were all starving. We went back to the main street and waited for about fifteen minutes for a table in one of the historical taverns. I was interested to see that, although some of the places we'd visited had unobtrusive electric lights, the tavern didn't. Just daylight through the windows and candles on the tables. We had an amazing lunch - crab and shrimp bisque for me followed by a welsh rarebit, and a sandwich of absolutely incredible salty Virginia ham for Michael. (Alex had noodles in butter sauce, so she was happy too.) I also had a tasty bottle of locally-brewed ginger ale. A fiddler moved from room to room playing while we ate. I really wished that I were able to drink alcohol, because they had a number of different historical punch recipes on the menu that I would've wanted to try.
I wanted to see another history/theater performance after we ate. There turned out to be a long line, so we waited perhaps half an hour. Then they brought us into a public room of a non-food-serving tavern in a very small group - perhaps fifteen people - gave us a few words to set the scene (Christmas, 1781), and left us to "overhear" a conversation between two men. The younger had been surrendered to the British, held for a few months on a prison ship, and then paroled and left to walk home from Charleston to Williamsburg, trying to avoid both armies. The older man was asking about his experiences and trying to prepare him for the changes he'd find in Williamsburg. At the end, the younger man's wife hurried in and they were reunited after years of separation. I confess that I got a little teary. Our guide then walked us upstairs to view the sleeping rooms of the tavern, and brought us down a different staircase to another common room where we "overheard" another conversation between a free black man and a slave, discussing the freedman's choice to serve in the Army and the other's contempt for his choice to "waste" his freedom that way. This one felt more anachronistic to me, although maybe I'm displaying my ignorance about 18th-century race relations. I really loved the first vignette, though, and I liked the intimacy of both performances.
We planned to go from there to visit a small plantation, but by the time we got a shuttle bus it was already 3:30 and Alex was really flagging. We knew she'd love the plantation, but figured she'd enjoy it more if she wasn't exhausted and cranky. So instead we went back to the hotel. There Alex played and Michael surfed the net while I took a little nap sitting up on the couch. (I guess she wasn't the only exhausted one.) We didn't do much until dinnertime.
I had made us reservations for a "seafood feast" at one of the official Williamsburg hotels, a modern one with a modern dining room. The buffet was absolutely lovely: the ubiquitous crab bisque, which I didn't mind at all having for the second meal in a row; various antipasti; massive cold displays of shrimp, mussels, raw oysters (oh, did I want some, but I was good), two kinds of smoked salmon, and enormous crab legs served with little cups of melted butter; crab cakes, mustard-encrusted salmon, and a half-dozen other cooked dishes; breads and cheeses; a sushi table with tuna and vegetable rolls and more preserved salmon (alas, no fresh raw salmon); and a cooking station offering fennel-crusted scallops and an unbelievably tasty mussel, mushroom, and spinach pasta. And desserts. We made ourselves a good dinner. Alex tried crab legs for the first time and fell in love. I just loved everything.
We got lost on the way home and saw a lot of pitch-dark scenic Virginia countryside. Oops. Alex was campaigning for a swim before bed, which we had promised her before the unscheduled extra driving. We extorted a promise that she would reward us for an evening swim with an EASY BEDTIME, and she agreed - including adding, to my provisions of "no goofing" and "no fussing" her own promise that "I won't say I'm not sleepy" and "I won't call mom and dad." Such a deal. We took her to the pool for half an hour and then she did go right to sleep. Michael and I took turns reading and sating our internet addiction until our eyelids drooped too.
Tomorrow: the plantation, the blacksmith's shop, a couple of great houses and their kitchens, and the folk art museum, which has a historic toys exhibit I am just salivating over. They have a thirteen-foot-long dollhouse.
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You'll be in heaven.
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(All the interpreters have to learn everything.)
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Sounds like all three of you are having a wonderful time!
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_____
*reenacting the Fur Trade era.
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Also, my dad often wonders half-jokingly if it was a mistake to introduce my sister and I to crab legs (as children) because then we'd whine and beg for it every single time we saw it on a menu *anywhere*. *grin*
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Then, this morning, as we pulled into the parking lot at IHOP, Alex asked, "Is there going to be crab at this restaurant?"
No, we explained. Crab legs are not a breakfast food.
"But why not?"
We are so. Very. Doomed. I'm sorry I laughed at your father's predicament.
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