Friday, December 7th
A meeting kept me at work a little later than we had hoped, so rather than pick Monika up at her work, I met her back at home at 1:30 and we were off about 1:45 for the drive down to Williamsburg. The traffic was light, so we kept just above the speed limit and made it to the Ramada Inn near the historic district after an easy two and a half hour drive. We quickly registered and carried our luggage up to the room so that we could sign in for the Volksmarch and start our walk.

We always enjoy the Williamsburg night walk put on by the Peninsula Pathfinders a couple of weeks before Christmas. The extensive historic region is decorated in Colonial style for Christmas, and there are bonfires or special activities going on. The walk route for the night walk passed through different sections of the historic district on the way out and back, so you really get to see it. We left late in the afternoon, so we got to see it in the dusk on the way out and in the black of night on the way back.

We left the Start/Finish at the Ramada Inn about 4:30 and walked down Second Avenue toward the historic district. One curious sight along the way was a pristine, restored 1957 Chevy sitting in the middle of a MacDonald’s restaurant. I went in to check if it was real, and sure enough it was a real automobile all right, propped up on jack stands—since everything else in the restaurant was decorated with1950s-style chrome and Formica tables and chairs, the Chevy fit right in. It was a restaurant theme, I guess, but I’ve never seen another one like it.

After we crossed some railroad tracks, we entered the historic district past some paddocks with the horses they use for pulling wagons and carriage rides. We cut over to the main street at the reconstructed House of Burgesses, Virginia’s Colonial assembly where Patrick Henry did the “Give me Liberty or give me Death” speech. We’ve taken tours in the past, and the interior is beautifully and authentically re-created, but this evening we turned left to head down the historic Duke of Gloucester Street.

A dim winter dusk was gradually falling as we passed down the street sprinkled with re-enactors and tourists. Lines were already forming for various taverns in the historic district which serve authentic Colonial cuisine. The experience of being served these old-fashioned meals by candlelight in rooms with soot-darkened beams and costumed waiters is quite remarkable. To experience life close to what it was like over 300 years ago for our forefathers is really unforgettable.

But we didn’t want to wait that long for dinner, so we strolled along the Duke of Gloucester Street examining the different Christmas decorations. These decorations are also authentic and consist of arrangements of fruits and greenery hung on the doorways. Compared to modern decorations with electric lights, these decorations are very low-key, but we find their naturalness and simplicity to be refreshing. Each year Colonial Williamsburg has a contest and awards blue ribbons to the best of these decorative arrangements, so we took pictures of the decorated doorways with the blue ribbon awards.

At the end of Duke of Gloucester where the historic district touches the College of William and Mary campus, we turned left to loop back along the southern edge of the historic district. We stopped for a leisurely dinner at The Seasons restaurant where Monika had a grilled chicken salad and I had the “Plantation Chicken” entrée. The description of this entrée was “grilled chicken on linguine in a peanut butter sauce”, and I was terribly curious how that would all turn out. Fortunately, it tastes is a whole lot better than it sounds!

Night had fallen when we continued on our way along Frances Street to the Williamsburg Inn. The Inn was festively decorated with modern electric lights and looked very inviting in the dark. We turned back to cross over the Colonial Parkway that connects Jamestown, Williamsburg, and Yorktown (each with great Year-Round Events!) and found the Boy Scout’s checkpoint. We were really happy to find they were selling home-made fudge of many different flavors again this year, and we deliberated long and hard before picking two pieces of chocolate walnut and vanilla cherry fudge. So we had some dessert as we turned back to the edge of the historic district. We continued alongside the campus of the College of William and Mary, which is a small, high-quality Virginia college charted by the British King and Queen in the 1600s. The route followed one side of the campus and turned back through town past our second checkpoint, a Baskin-Robbins (and yet another desert!), to the Governor’s Palace in the historic district .

We heard fifes and drums as we walked toward the Palace and quickened our pace to see what was going on. The first thing we noticed was that the front of the rather large palace was lit with the ruddy glow of some very large bonfires! This is just like they did for special ceremonies in Colonial times and is only done on special occasions in Williamsburg today. It gave the palace an eerie, almost hellish light, and I was torn between turning left to take pictures of the palace or following the sound of the fifes and drums to the right. I decided the bonfires would last a while so I followed the music to a square just north of the Courthouse.

There we found the Williamsburg Fife and Drum Corps giving an evening concert of some Christmas music and marches from the Colonial period. We caught the tail end of the performance, after which they marched in formation down the Duke of Gloucester Street lit on either side by men carrying flaring, smoking torches. This was really a scene straight out of history and all the tourists were taking pictures like mad. After the corps marched down a side street and disbanded, we walked down a pitch-black side street back to the Governor’s Palace.

While we had chased the fife and drum corps, the bonfires had burned down a bit, but I still took a set of pictures to try to capture the unique quality of the lighting. We were completely off the Volksmarch route by this time, of course, so we returned to the Duke of Gloucester Street and walked back down toward the House of Burgesses. The crowds were dispersing and we had one final opportunity to savor a “world lit only by fire” as we rejoined the walk route and headed back toward the Finish point. If this walk is offered again when Williamsburg has one of these special events, I highly recommend trying to experience it all the only real way, by walking through the recreation of our country’s history.

After the walk, we headed for the Jacuzzi and the pool. The pool was as warm as bath water, which disappointed Monika as she can’t really swim when it’s that hot, bu made me happy as I can just jump right in. Of course after I jump right in, I sink right down to the bottom, which is always a surprise to me, although heaven only knows it shouldn’t be by this time. I keep hoping I will float like all normal people and keep being bitterly disappointed. Sigh. But to compensate they had a really nice Jacuzzi which had enough bubbles and jets to give me a great massage. If enough bubbles get trapped by my swimsuit, I can almost float! In any case, the water was quite hot and that helped work out the sore muscles and particularly a stiff right knee. It was so relaxing that my legs were wobbly when I finally staggered out a half hour or so later, and we were both wonderfully relaxed and fell asleep almost immediately.

Saturday December 8th
We went off to have breakfast at a pancake house we had found on our walk the previous night, and I had all of my waffle and half of Monika’s pancakes so I was stoked up on carbohydrates for the morning. We signed in for the Williamsburg day walk and started off with a couple from Norfolk who walked about our pace and were very easy to talk to. So we walked and chatted our way back to the historic district where we again strolled along the Duke of Gloucester Street. It was an interesting contrast to see the Christmas decorations by daylight—nice to see some more of the details. This time, however, rather than walk to the end of Duke of Gloucester we turned off early to head south to the checkpoint. The Boy Scout leaders at the checkpoint had hot cider ready, and it was just crisp enough that we gratefully availed ourselves of the opportunity.

Our route then looped back past the historic district to the William and Mary campus. This time, however, we turned into the campus and walked all the way through the campus, passing a very pretty Japanese-style bridge along the way. We then turned back toward the Finish point through some genteel neighborhoods, passing the checkpoint one last time. The really nice folks there offered us some hot cider on the house, and we savored it before continuing back past the Williamsburg Inn. We turned off before Frances Street, however, and took a kind of paved alley through some of the outbuildings of the historic district where we got an “up close and personal” look at some of the livestock, particularly horses and sheep. One of the sheep obligingly looked into the camera when I called for it to pose, so rather than taking a long, arduous time to make a decent photograph, I just went ahead and took a sheep shot (ta dum bum!).

We returned to the Finish point to get our awards, which for the day walk were a wooden cut outs of buildings in the historic district. Each wood block is cut into the silhouette of the building, and then a graphical picture of each building is silk-screened onto the front of the block. They are very nice and well-nigh indestructible, which will be handy if we ever have grandchildren! This year we earned the “Peter Hay’s Shop” cut out, which was a small white house with a large bay window on one side for displaying merchandise.

After getting our books stamped we walked down the street a bit to Hardee’s for a quick lunch before our meetings. The first meeting was on the 2005 Volksmarch convention, where we learned the site was going to be Cherry Hill, New Jersey, which is across the river from Philadelphia. The second meeting was the Virginia Volksmarch Association quarterly meeting. “Gallopin’ Fred” Lopez (over 80,000 kilometers so far and going strong!) chaired the meeting and was elected to another 2 year term. This was all rather exciting (we don’t get out much), so after the meetings we were rather looking forward to doing the walk at Yorktown.

We started the Yorktown Year-Round-Event at the gift shop, where we found two very nice Revolutionary War dolls, one girl in dress and petticoats and a drummer boy in uniform. So there went $100. Then I found two CD ROMs, one with pictures of Revolutionary War sites and another with some songs of that era, and naturally picked them up also. So we dropped these things off at the car and started off on our walk by heading south across the remnants of the battlefield along the river coast. Along the way we passed by redoubt number 10, where Alexander Hamilton had lead a dawn charge of Americans armed only with unloaded muskets and fixed bayonets. That took a lot of raw courage and certainly looked different than the military service of most modern politicians. The Americans took the redoubt after about 10 minutes of fierce hand-to-hand fighting, by the way, and its loss was one factor that forced Cornwallis to surrender his army, thus ending the Revolutionary War.

We continued swinging south along the riverside drive, where we found huge new mansions alternating with very modest older homes. It looked like rich folks were buying up the older homes when they came on the market, tearing them down, and them building multi-story mansions with a view out over the river. In any case it offered a rather stark contrast in lifestyles. The route turned inland at Moore House where we saw our first herd of deer for the evening. I was determined to get a deer shot, but these were much too far away so we continued on the route back toward Surrender Field. Here Cornwallis surrended his army, but did so with very bad grace, pleading indisposition and sending out his second in command to deliver his sword, sign the papers, and whatnot.

We curled inland a bit to a small lake where we watched the sun set in the west. It looked beautiful reflected in the lake, so I tried to take some pictures before we continued back to the main road and turned north to head toward the town of Yorktown. It was dusk by this time and we saw at least three more distinct herds of deer. They let the cars drive up to them without acting afraid, but when we approached on foot the acted very leery and wouldn’t let us pedestrians get anywhere close! I expect that they were far more used to people driving by in cars than people walking around the battlefield, given the typical American penchant for driving wherever possible. Whatever the reason, I was so frustrated I finally snapped a couple of pictures where the deer were about 200 yards off and looked like pinheads in the viewfinder. I figured maybe I could enlarge the pictures later and at least prove to folks that deer were around during our walk!

Darkness fell as we walked into Yorktown, which was rather a pity as there are many historic buildings there and the town hasn’t really changed all that much since the Revolutionary War period. But we saw a couple of the really old houses before we turned down the hill to the street right alongside the river. Heading north along the river, we passed an old, seedy-looking pub with many cars out front, a bright, shiny newer pub with large plate glass windows but only one car parked out front, and a curious seafood restaurant with many faux Greek statues of half-naked women in front and a really large, garish neon sign (Nick’s, as I recall). Which one would you have chosen for dinner?

We discussed the pros and cons of each one as we walked through the town and past a riverside museum with a quite large model of a square-rigged ship out front. It was really getting dark by this time, but of course I hadn’t brought the flashlights. We were fine so long as we had a sidewalk and street lamps, but when the sidewalk and street lamps ended and we were walking on the shoulder of the two lane road in the dark, it got a little dicey. Fortunately, that part was rather short before we came to the Yorktown Victory Center, which has a lot of exhibits about the battle and is well worth a visit (we stopped when we visited with our kids years ago). Our route lead on just a bit further to one of the informative roadside signs that mark historical spots. It was too dark to read it, but I took a flash picture and we could review the picture in the display of the digital camera. That way we could figure out the correct information for the checkpoint, thank goodness, and write it on our start cards.

The route back was a return along the same narrow, dark road, and I would of course advise anyone else taking this walk at night to BRING A FLASHLIGHT. But we stumbled back along the shoulder of the road and were thankful to get back to the sidewalk and street lamp section. One reward was seeing the graceful bridge to Gloucester outlined by many lamps. The lamps reflected in the smooth water at the river’s edge and gleamed waveringly in the inky blackness of the night. All together, the scene was a moody and fascinating mirror image of reflected light and dark.

As we came back down “restaurant row”, Monika reached a decision in the following way. She hates seafood and is not all that partial to half naked women, so the seafood restaurant was out. Given the choice between the two pubs, she argued compellingly for taking the one with more cars out front, which she considered prima facie evidence of better food or reputation among the locals. I had a yen for the more brightly-lit pub, but I agreed with her logic and we chose the one farthest down the walk. As I walked past the Harley-Davidson parked out front to go inside I was saying to myself, “Please let this not be a biker bar!”. Aside from not taking any personal checks or credit cards, I didn’t see any evidence of it being a biker bar. The crowds at the other tables looked more like college students than bikers. So we took a booth in the corner and had a rather good, if simple, meal, before continuing on our walk.

The walk back up hill in the pitch-black night was possible only because the street was smoothly paved and we were walking in the middle of it. We really couldn’t see where our feet were. More by instinct than by seeing, we turned back onto the main road to the Visitor’s Center. We were rewarded by the sight of the victory column eerily lit in the night by a battery of lanterns. For some reason the lights gave it a greenish cast, but it certainly did look different and I tried to take a picture of it as we passed by. That was harder than it sounds, because it was so dark that the camera was doing time exposures and that requires that you hold the camera absolutely still for a second or so. So I braced myself against a tree and tried to be as still as possible while snapping the picture and seemed to get at least some image of it.

We finished up the walk by walking over the bridge to the Visitor Center in the dark, but fortunately the bridge is wide, solid, and has very high railings so we didn’t blunder off it! Our car was the only one in an otherwise deserted lot, and we were happy to climb back in for the drive back to Williamsburg. But just as we are driving out of the lot, we saw a large deer grazing peacefully right beside the road. Recalling that the deer were unafraid of people in cars, I told Monika to get ready to snap the picture while I slowly drove us over beside the deer. When we were about 10 feet away, Monika rolled down the window and took a flash shot of the deer. Success! I finally got a decent picture of a deer. The deer was a bit startled, but he only wandered off about 20 feet back from the road, so I don’t think we really scared him. I triumphantly drove on the Colonial Parkway back to Williamsburg for the evening Jacuzzi session and a well-deserved rest.

Sunday December 9th
With the restaurant next to the Ramada Inn closed (doggone it), we decided to try another pancake house nearby, and fortunately they opened early. I had a waffle with strawberries and Monika a low fat omelet (difficult, but possible), after which we checked out and drove down the Colonial Parkway to Jamestown. I saw Monika gaze intently out the window as we neared the island, and she suddenly turned to me and said, “That was an bald eagle!” It had taken her a while to figure out what the big, black bird with the funny-looking head was, so we had already passed by. I yanked my head around just saw a big bird high up in a tree, so I whipped the car around and drove back to get a better look at the bird. We could both clearly see his head of white feathers on an otherwise black body, and when he flew off it was very clearly a bald eagle. Unfortunately Monika couldn’t get the camera to take the picture, so we only got a picture of him flying off in the distance (like most of our deer pictures!), but it was exciting nonetheless.

The gate for Jamestown National Park opened at 830 a.m., so we didn’t have to park outside like we did one year when we came even earlier. The Visitor Center was closed until 9 am, so we decided to do the loop down to the glass-making house first and then sign up for the walk (from walking this YRE previous years, we were pretty sure they would have that loop as part of the route).

We started walking down the road along the narrow isthmus, and I wondered if the Jamestown Jinx was going to strike again this year. Every year we have walked this YRE, it has been cold, blowing, and either raining or sleeting, with the result that we were thoroughly wet, cold, and miserable on the walk out to the glasshouse. Since it was already cold, gray, and threatening, it was with some trepidation that I set out for the walk down the isthmus. It ended up being cold and blustery, but only sprinkling rather than raining or sleeting, so I’m hoping the jinx has been broken.

For this part of the walk we had nice views of the James River on the one side and a shallow bay and backwater on the other. The isthmus we were crossing was at some points not much wider than the two-lane road. I watched the small ferryboats cross the river, but didn’t really see a way to take a good photograph of them, so I kept the camera in its pocket until we reached the glass-making house. Actually there is the excavation exhibit which showcases the ruins of the furnaces from the original Jamestown glass-making house from 1607, and a modern exhibit area where hand-blown glass objects like those from Jamestown are still being made.

We first visited the exhibit with the excavations of the original glass house, and I enjoyed taking pictures of the almost 400-year old furnaces. There was a real sense of history looking at those old ruins and reading about the attempts of the colonists to form an industry that would give enough exchange value to support the colony. Unfortunately, it didn’t work out for reasons that were apparently political as well as practical. Practically, shipping the glassware back to England on ships was difficult and added significant cost, but more interesting was some of the political events surrounding the glass house.

To get the expertise they needed, the colonists imported glass workers from Germany. These workers didn’t fit in with the English colonists and ultimately went over to the side of the Indians in the initial struggle for control of the land. Apparently some of them even watched the colonists and kept the Indians informed about what they were up to. I could certainly see that Germans might be as sympathetic to the native Americans as to the British colonists. But no matter how we look back across the centuries at their actions, their ending was rather gruesome. At the beginning of the Powhatan uprising, the Indians decided they could not really trust these turncoat foreigners and slaughtered them all before moving against the colonists. So the glass-making experiment, like other entrepreneurial enterprises of the colonists, didn’t work out very well.

The modern glasshouse, on the other hand, has been there for over 25 years and seems to be a going concern. The house is made to look rustic and similar to what the original might have been, and the glass blowing is down by hand in the same way it was done at that time. There are some differences, of course. The furnaces are heated by gas rather than by wood and charcoal, and the furnaces looked like they used asbestos insulation and firebrick. The American glass society supports the place and trains apprentices and journeymen glass blowers there, and it must be weird to be working with folks always traipsing by and watching you work. We were there in the winter and the heat from the furnaces made it toasty warm and cozy, but we could well imagine that it would be blazingly hot with those furnaces roaring on those 90-degree, humid Virginia summer days without any air conditioning.

As usual, we couldn’t resist buying some of the handcrafted glass goods—we usually buy the ones that we are seeing them make that day. They were making the tops to sugar bowls that morning, so we bought a sugar bowl and creamer set. We were happy to see that the shop at one end of the glass house was also offering wares from former journeymen who had now founded their own shops. I felt reassured to know that the tradition of handcrafted glasswork will continue in our country as we turned back up the road toward the Visitor Center, which lies on Jamestown Island proper.

The rain continued to hold off as we retraced our steps and we found the box in the gift shop in the center (but we avoided buying anything for once!). I took a fresh look at all the exhibits at the Visitor Center and was impressed with how nice they were. The continuing excavations on the island were revising our picture of those early colonists. Many years ago the interpretation was that the colonists were feckless treasure-seekers who were looking for gold and didn’t want to work a lick. Nowadays, the evidence points to the colonists not only working very hard, but also being a highly skilled group of folks in all the ways necessary to maintain a colony.

After we signed up and read the directions, we walked out the rear door of the gift shop to follow the trail over toward the bronze statue of Pocahontas. I find the story a little sad in that Pocahontas died from disease while in Britain before being able to return to the colony. We circled over to what used to be a cemetery, but which now held the excavated foundations of the colonist’s church, which we learned had been built on the cemetery in the early days of the colony. A docent told us that they had excavated the remains before re-establishing the foundations of the church, and they were trying to identify what folks they were by radiological methods before re-interring them. It was a curious fact that the foundations of the church were placed directly on some of the bones of the deceased, which suggested that either the colonists didn’t know or didn’t care who the buried folks were when they built the church.

We started back along the banks of the James River to a large bronze statue of Captain John Smith gazing out over the river and a nearby church from the later 1600s that was still in use! The church had plain wooden benches rather than pews and I found it to be a curiously austere but intimate place of worship. I particularly liked the pattern of glass panes at one end, and tried to get a good picture of that before we walked on past the current excavation site to the ruins of the original Jamestown.

After almost 400 years, there isn’t a whole lot left of the buildings, of course, but you cn see the outlines of the foundations for many of them. The plaques show the current best guess about how the buildings would have looked like, what the building was used for, and who lived there. Imagining the folks so long ago trying so very hard to make a successful colony on this very spot was a very moving thought.

The final loop of our route was to walk the driving tour loop around the rest of the island. There are very interesting plaques about every ½ mile or so, and if you take this walk you really should make the effort to walk into the turn outs and read them. We were getting tired and it was so tempting sometimes to keep on walking and not make those extra steps! But I’m glad I did because I learned about some of the other attempts at industry on the part of the colonists including spinning silk and weaving silk garments! But it was finally tobacco plants imported from the Caribbean that worked out for the colonists, and by 1619 all the spare acreage was planted in tobacco and the colonists had given up the glass house and the silk industry.

It was very quiet on our walk around the island. Parts of it were tall pine forests that might have looked about the same as when the settlers were first there. It is so nice to visit a place that does not noticeably change from year to year. The marshes and swamps that fostered so many diseases were still there, also, of course, and one plaque said that six out of seven colonists died prematurely from an entire cycle of endemic diseases. I wonder if they had any inkling of how their great adventure would ultimately turn out, or were they too busy just surviving to ponder the distant future?

We surprised a Great Blue Heron on at the edge of the marsh our way back, and I was surprised at the loud uneven screeching sound that he gave, perhaps as an alarm, before he flew away across the marsh. I saw clearly this time how he was really blue, especially underneath, and could watch the curiously slow flapping of his wings as he flew away just above the bull rushes. We finally crossed the last bridge over the marsh to rejoin the road back to the parking lot and our car. We had taken the long 16 kilometer loop and were really tired and footsore, but also reluctant to leave such a pretty and historic spot to return to our workaday world.

But return we must, so we crawled into the car and I drove to Richmond, where we had lunch at our favorite Arby’s. I noticed as we came out from lunch that the tires on the car looked under-inflated and decided to check them. So we visited a nearby Wal Mart to buy the tire pressure gauged and a foot pump, and after I inflated the tires properly Monika drove us the rest of the way back to Fairfax. We timed it almost perfectly to see a Redskins football game from 4-7 pm, and I could start typing this chronicle while Monika fixed dinner. The Redskins won the game, so it was all together as close to a perfect weekend as one can reasonably expect in this world!