Katie and Dan's Travels

The battle at Yorktown was a critical event in the life of the USA-to-be, but it’s hard to get a grasp of it on the site: it’s a battlefield memorial, with lots of old emplacements and remains but little life to it. There is a hideous monument put up after decades of procrastination by Congress, the shaft of which is of Maine granite (but we didn’t learn which quarry). On the way in to Yorktown we stopped first at the Virginia Victory Center, and yes Virginia, it is as bad as it sounds; if you ever go to Yorktown, give this a miss. … We left early, and one of the staff was clearly so distraught that we would abandon their narrative in midstream that she said we would be missing the sunken ships in the basement (or somewhere…..); we thought that we all have enough sunken ships in our basements and left. At the National Park Service site we took a short foot tour of the historic houses of Yorktown, and the NPS interpreter was terrific: great sense of humor, knowledgeable and with the capacity to blend past and present; a rare treat, as the visitor interpretive trade is often given to earnestness, or worse.

As we have wandered south we have been fortunate to have a series of friends who have kindly taken us in for periods ranging from 1 to 4 days, and who, in some cases, spend considerable time showing us the local sights. … So when we told Jerry and Ellen we were passing though Virginia nothing would do but that we spend the night, despite them just having returned from a three week trip to England a few days before! Jerry and Ellen gave us a personalized walking tour of downtown Fredericksburg, and Jerry showed us what he considers to be the most important monument in the US: to the Virginia Statute of Religious Freedom, written by Thomas Jefferson. There is a monument to Mary Washington, George’s mother, a small, very well-done museum to GW’s friend, Monroe, who had an office in what is now a small museum, and a farm across the Rappahanock where GW grew up. … We are essentially giving the Civil War sites a pass on this trip, both because neither of us is fascinated by it and also because once you start to visit the Civil War sites, it’s a lifetime’s occupation, so we’ll do it in another lifetime….