This morning we really did not know what we would be doing today or where we would end up, but we knew we had to get Glenn ' s truck fixed. He called a tow truck driver who arrived by 8:30, which was the earliest they would send someone. The tow truck took it to the dealership in Williamsburg, Holiday Chevy, in case you are ever in the area, who bc of our situation moved us to the front of the queue. G went with the truck while we got ready to go to Colonial Williamsburg.
The kids did a little school work and I called to tell the campground in Cape Hatteras that we didn't think we would make it tonight. A sad call indeed. We were ready to leave and we're going to pick G up from the dealership, presuming that it would take hours to fix the truck, but we're surprised to hear that the problem had been found (not surprised at all to hear he'd been crawling under the truck with them to help diagnose it--wires running to the starter had melted from the heat of the engine block), and the truck would be ready in two hours. Soooo I called the campground back, after some discussion, and told them just kidding, we would in fact be there tonight.
The campground in Williamsburg was nice enough to let us leave our RVs until 4 without charging us another day, so after lunch with G at a yummy diner, Mom, the girls, and I headed out to Colonial Williamsburg (CW) to make the best of it.
About CW, I'm not sure what I expected, an amusement park for history buffs I guess, but what I found was so much weirder and overwhelming than merely a theme park. I was so confused at first where the park began and ended but then I learned gradually over the next few hours, and then from Wikipedia later out of sheer curiosity, that CW is not merely a park that opens and closes at a certain time for which you pay admission, but it is in fact the town of Williamsburg, open 24/7 like any normal town, with the obvious exception that everyone there wears costumes and pretends it is 18th C. Colonial Virginia. It is a town that in a strange historical Stepford Wife way is meticulously curated to recreate each detail from the daily lives of its inhabitants so that when you visit the blacksmith's shop, for instance, the random bits of paper plastered to the wall on his work bench are articles from colonial newspapers. A little about the history: Apparently around 1900 residents became alarmed that important Revolutionary War era buildings were being abandoned so they convinced John D. Rockefeller, Jr., to start buying up all of downtown, tear down everything that wasn't period, and reconstruct the rest in meticulous detail. The whole city went in on the plan and boom, instant history. So in retrospect, as a visitor today, you don't actually NEED to buy a ticket, only to get into certain tours and such. You can just waltz in whenever you like and pretend you've gone back in time. It's quite weird and wonderful all at the same time.
While all that is well and good and I would highly recommend it to others, it was freaking hot outside, very humid, and my 4 yo was quite grouchy, not handling any of the tours where anyone had to talk for more than 2 minutes. So we did the kids' scavenger hunt which led us to 7 different buildings and the whole thing took about 3 hours which was perfect for our short attention span crew.
My goodness we were all wiped out anyway, and, oh yeah, we still had to drive 3.5 hours to Cape Hatteras.
What.were.we.thinking?
We were thinking we wanted to go to the beach, that's what. So we went back to the campsite to hook up the RVs, and pulled out by 4pm. After a (thankfully) uneventful drive, we arrived just past dark at Camp Hatteras at our beachfront (!!) campsite.
Not an accident that we are just across the dune from the beach as I reserved these spots several months ago, but dang was I glad to get here tonight. And you can bet that G didn't turn off his truck until he was sure the rv was in the right spot. Just in case, God forbid, it wouldn't crank again.
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