Events of Tuesday, December 28, 2010

            Before we awoke this morning, our beloved relatives left us at our amazing Williamsburg house and headed for the airport in Richmond, Virginia. About three to four hours after they left, the rest of us Taylors got up, showered, had breakfast, cleaned out the house, and packed up the RV. It was a hectic time for all of us, but we made our timeline of having everything of ours out of the rental home by ten in the morning. Then it took over an hour, with all of us working together inside the RV, for everything to be back where it goes and for us to be on the road again.

            But eventually we did achieve our goal and drove the RV to the Historic Jamestowne Visitor’s Center. We all trooped inside, obtained our admission stickers, received our information, and then trooped back outside to the RV for lunch. After lunch, we watched the documentary about the place in a very cool circular theater with a screen encircling the audience.

            At the conclusion of the movie, we strolled outside and joined the ranger program with Ranger Misty. She was a very good ranger – informative, interactive, and interesting. She taught us all about “the first permanent English settlement in North America”. As we walked from the monument to the reconstructed church building, we passed a memorial statue of Pocahontas. However, Ranger Misty called it “Pocagawea”, as it is historically inaccurateS; she is dressed more like a Plains Indian (such as Sacagawea). My favorite part of the ranger program was the “scratch-and-sniff” part – she used an Indian arrowhead to scrape at a stick of sassafras (root beer), and then passed both around for her audience to scratch and sniff. Exports of sassafras roots from Jamestown provided an early source of income for the settlers. Unfortunately, the promised cure for various ailments did not pan out and it soon lost its reputation as a cure-all.  Then Ranger Misty chose Abby to demonstrate the size of the sturgeon fish that the first colonists found in the James River – fifteen feet long. The ranger gave her and another involuntary ‘volunteer’ each one end of a fifteen-foot long rope, and then showed us an actual scale of the fifteen-foot-long fish, found in an archaeological dig.

            After the ranger program, we wandered around the reconstructed fort, and then drove Harvey to the glasshouse. The goal of the Virginia Company in setting up a joint stock company in the New World was to use this newly discovered place to make money. One of the ways the first colonists tried to do that was glassmaking. Although the glass industry failed for Jamestowne, the National Park Service built The Glasshouse, a modern version of what the original Glasshouse of 1608 might have been like. We watched, entranced, as modern glassblowers created glass candle stick holders and a variety of Christmas tree ornaments – spiral, teardrop, cracked, and striped. The artisans produce fabulous glass items for purchase at the Glasshouse gift shop. No two pieces are exactly alike as each is hand-blown from molten glass. It was very cool.

            When Mom and Dad insisted that we leave the Glasshouse (we could have stayed all day), we drove to the other Jamestown, the Jamestown Settlement, gift shop for sunglasses. Lindsey wanted to buy the aviator glasses she had seen in the gift shop last Wednesday, but was persuaded not to buy them because she might be getting them for Christmas. This, of course, was a hoax, but a quite persuasive one. So we returned to purchase the said aviator glasses. Furthermore, Abby and Ben tend to break their sunglasses, so they too wanted to purchase some. Mom chaperoned to pay for it all, and I just came along to be a fashion consultant, while Dad stayed with the RV. A few minutes and three pairs of sunglasses later, we drove to Newport News Costco. While Dad coaxed us through our first math session in almost a week, Mom went shopping alone in Costco. She hasn’t had that opportunity for awhile now. Before the trip, Mom did all the shopping by herself on Friday mornings, but Daddy has kind of taken over the grocery shopping during the trip as a way to serve our family and give Mom a break. After our math time was up, dancing our way across the icy parking lot, we headed into Costco for a delicious dinner and an equally delectable dessert at the Costco food court. A select few of us then took a swift sample tour around Costco, especially enjoying the David’s Cookies holiday cheesecake samples. With the manager’s permission, we then settled down in the Costco parking lot in Harvey for the night.