Birthday Week Continues: Day Trippers

Something I always praise my folks for is raising me to believe in the Day Trip. Sometimes they will say we took day trips as a young family because money was tight and national parks and whatnot are free or cheap. One plot twist they recently revealed was that when they (we) were just starting out, Dad's folks were paying the gasoline credit card bill, so climbing in the white Ponitac made good sense. Whatever the reason, I have tons of (sometimes sketchy, admittedly) fond memories of trips to the National Zoo, Luray, countless battlefields, antiquing trips, Charlottesville, etc., etc.

My late 90s Civic is certainly smaller than that early 70s "midsized" car, nonetheless, it handled not only the baseball roadtrip below, but also a Saturday trip to Jamestowne, with my reprint edition of the WPA guide for Virginia in hand. Yup, serious history geeking-out with P and H. For those of you playing at home, see page 628; for the rest of you:

State 5 parallels the north bank of the James River through woodland and crosses the Chickahominy. The route is exceptionally beautiful, particularly in season when heavy foliage frames its ever-changing vistas. It traverses some of the oldest plantations of Anglo-America.

As true today as during the Depression. P read for us -- Revolutionary and Civil War tidbits, and about the homes of Declaration of Independence signer Benjamin Harrison and President John Tyler. Meanwhile, H burst into the most random song snippets, and I was birdwatching (only, all I saw were cardinals, flying up out of the roadside gravel).

We wandered around the Jamestowne site for a couple of hours. Not the re-creation, but the site of the 17th century town -- at least, what the James River left us of it. A few monuments and markers from the Jamestown 1907 Exposition remain, as does the church tower, with its c. 1906 rebuilt chapel. Also 100 years ago, they built brick outlines of foundations of buildings identified at that time. Recent archaeology reveals the post-holes of the palisade.

It was a hot day --but not the hottest day I ever spent there (that distinction goes to a trip made with fellow Val staffers) -- and that always make me ask: what on earth were they thinking? Humid and low-lying land, and what must have been serious forest undergrowth, surely made for an unlikely spot to build a town -- or city. And yet they built a couple of sets of brick rowhouses! (LoC has some broken links. It looks like there ought to be a HABS drawing online, but I can't get to it.) Right on the river, we got a bit of a breeze, and a display of osprey fishing. Thanks fo the shop manager for loaning his very own binoculars!

For the return trip, we boarded the Jamestown-Scotland ferry (we took the "Surry," built 1979, I see) and then wandered over to U.S. 460. Obviously, that meant dinner at the Virginia Diner. (Oh brave new world that allows that to be hyperlink! A stop for rural townies and midcentury travellers now has a web presence.) Duh Moment of the day: those fields that don't have corn or soybeans must host peanut plants!