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Mid-Atlantic Vacation Blog
Now this is just a side commentary about things I've noticed in Virginia. As we have driven on the highway into and out of Richmond, you cannot see any evidence that there are cities or any other sign of industrialization from the highway. The road is cut among the trees, but as we approached Richmond yesterday and Williamsburg today, we could not tell that a city was near. This means that there are no billboards and no tall signs. The reason I bring this up is because we needed to make a bathroom stop when we got to Williamsburg and even when we followed the small signs, we had trouble finding anything. This is how we ended up at an outlet mall (there's got to be a bathroom there somewhere, right)?
So while we're not really learning about the history of our country at the outlet mall, it's our vacation and we decided to do what we wanted whether it was educational or not. However, since we are moth committed to increasing our knowledge of nutrition, we chose to check out the Rocky Mountain Chocolate Factory. There, we discovered that they cover about anything with chocolate, including cheesecake! But wait, there's more! Could anything possibly be better than chocolate-covered cheesecake?
That's right, it's chocolate-covered cheesecake ON A STICK! Nothing beats the thrill of discovery.
After our brief visit to the mall, we cruised up and down the street looking for lunch (difficult to do when all of the signs are at ground level) and eventually ate at Berret's in Colonial Williamsburg. I had crab cakes (mandatory in this part of the country, it seems) and some very small amounts of other food. This turned out to be a fancy place that put very small amounts of food on a gigantic plate (and not on a stick) and charged lots of money for it. I guess that's what we get for trying to eat at local places.
After lunch, we looked around the shops in the Colonial Williamsburg area, or whatever area we were in; it was very difficult to figure out what was going on. Colonial Williamsburg is a designated area of the city with a map like a theme park, but there are no fences or discernable boundaries. It also advertises all of the different ticket packages you can get, but we kept wondering what a "ticket" actually got you into since it seemed as though we were free to roam as we pleased. And it isn't as though tickets are cheap; $36 is quite a bit to expect people to pay on the honor system. I can understand that they would let anyone into the shops, because who is going to turn away someone willing to spend money? But we didn't know what was free and what wasn't, and since I have very little desire to participate in non-caloric learning, we didn't stay long.
However, for the time we did stay, we did see a few people in costume, sort of:
I think they were on their way to their re-enactment positions, but I thought it looked a little out of place for them to be pushing a super-modern-looking stroller. We also saw various other characters and people setting up a cannon on what appeared to be a reenactment battlefielld. We also did take time to go into a small church:
We noticed inside that on the end of each pew was a list of one or more names and they were all of historical figures, including George Washington, John Adams, and Thomas Jefferson. We asked a costumed person inside the church what the significance of the names was and she explained that they were all people who had worshipped at that church. She also explained that you could not hold public office if you did not belong to a church. (WARNING: Opinionated Political Commentary Ahead) And that got me thinking that it was ironic that the people who created our country declared that we should have freedom of religion and their predecessors who settled here so they could be free from having to practice a specific religion made the laws such that you could not serve in public office unless you practiced a specific religion. I guess 400 years gives you time to get some perspective.
Once we got away from to potential non-caloric education, we made our local Dairy Queen stop (Brooke gave very specific instructions on how to make her chocolate-dipped strawberry Blizzard and was very pleased with the result) and then we played some miniature golf:
We went to play at this place because they advertised that they had ponds and waterfalls and turtles. We saw lots of water, a lizard of some sort, a duck sitting on a nest of eggs, water flowing anywhere, but certainly no turtles. We also saw lots of flowers, like this one:
As for the game, Brooke beat me by two shots (I was distracted by the disappointment of not seeing any turtles).
We continued our day of caloric discovery by looking for some dinner. I originally wanted to eat at a local place instead of a chain because of the unique experience and all, but almost all of them looked really fancy and expensive and I want to eat somewhere without feeling like I'm under-dressed (I only brought one shirt that has a collar). I eventually settled on a place called Red, Hot, and Blue, a barbecue place with a Memphis Blues theme that looked as though Smokey Bones had merged with Dick Clark's American Bandstand. It turned out to be a chain, but there are no locations in Indiana (nor does it have a location in Tennessee; isn't that odd for a Memphis-themed restaurant?), so I would rationalize it being "local enough". I got a combination of pulled pork, ribs (Memphis-style), and beef brisket, along with baked beans, cole slaw, and a roll, with an appetizer of catfish and fries. Berret's could learn something from this.
Using the same "local" logic, we got dessert from Friendly's where I indulged in a banana split (very yummy). We did a little gift shopping, then called it a night.
So I guess I lied about going to one of the Jamestowns today, but tomorrow I think we're going to pick one and go. We'll probably go back to the outlet mall, see if we can find an affordable local restaurant to try, and go on a ghost tour in the evening. Also, we'll have the challenge of finding a place to eat breakfast. There are about 8 different local places that advertise themselves as being a "House of Pancakes", but given our experiences so far with the local places versus the chains, we might be better off at IHOP. That is, unless one of them makes pancakes on a stick.
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