Field Trip!

I got to go with Little Chris (the son formerly known as CJ) and his class from school on their field trip to Colonial Jamestown yesterday.

We went there last summer, but the day we went it was about 104 degrees with the humidity. I quickly learned a good lesson about what fabrics of underwear are not good on high humidity days.

Yesterday was about 65-70 degrees and beautiful.

Here are some of the pictures that Chris and I took.

Chris and the other kids got to scrape the hair off of a deer skin with a seashell, the way the Powatan Indians used to.

There are 3 ships (yes, real ships) on a dock that are the actual size of the first 3 that brought settlers over. The scary thing is that these ships are tiny, but this one (or the one that it is a replica of), carried over 100 passengers in the hold of the ship for the 4 month journey to Virginia. That doesn't count the sailors or the livestock.

The passengers were rarely even ever invited above decks.

All 100 of them were in very close quarters the whole time. I can't even imagine the smell.

We got to see how th Powatan Indians made their canoes by burning out logs and then scraping out the ashes with (can you guess?) sea shells.

Chris and the other kids got to try scraping the canoes.

It made all of their hands very black with the ash.

We learned about how the settlers and the indians traded with each other, and how several people got killed over bad trades.And we got to see a demonstration of a match lock musket.

They are very loud, and I would think pretty imprecise compared to the firepower that we have available for warfare today.

But they beat the heck out of bows and arrows, which is why, as the guide said, we all speak English today.

This is the monument that was built for the 350th anniverary of the landing at Jametown.

That could have only been commissioned by a man. Can we say Freudian?

Here is the question that Little Chris has been asking people about that monument.

How many bricks did it take to finish that monument?

Answer: Just one. (Key word: finish). lol.

It has now been 401 years since the English first landed here.

Last year Queen Elizabeth came over to celebrate the 400th anniversary. That was kind of cool. They even shut down the entire southbound strip of I-64 from Richmond to Williamsburg to make way for her motorcade.

We happened to be driving North at the time and got to pass the motorcade going the other way.