Virginia Vacation - Day 7

This was our second day of historical nerditry, as we went over to Yorktown. Same deal as Jamestown, the state has their own facility with recreated period scenes and the National Park Service is in charge of the actual location. Unlike Jamestown, though, there's been no numerically-significant anniversary to spur spending, so both locations are a bit disappointing.

The state's facility, the Yorktown Victory Center, has a decent museum area, but the movie they show is not very good at all. It tries to tell the story of the battle and the revolution by going through an American encampment before the last big push of the battle and hearing what various soldiers are talking about. It's not content-free, but it doesn't tell you much.

The recreated areas are small, and the encampment is too clean and ordered to suggest that the troops stationed there are fighting a war. There's also a farm/homestead area which doesn't quite fit in, though I liked that they were growing hops.

The NPS site's visitor center is suffering from age a bit, and the movie appears to have been made no later than 1981. The short walking tour we took did an excellent job of covering the basics of the seige and did take us through some of the remaining earthworks. But to see the whole site requires a driving tour, which we decided not to take. Which is too bad, as I'd have liked to seen more.

We did go through the actual town on the way to the NPS site. The downtown appears to mostly be an open-air mall-type thing, which we thankfully did not stop to explore.

One thing we noticed on the way home was the preponderance of gates on the on and off ramps that would cut them off from the roadways. From what I've read they seem to be there to allow for contraflow during hurricane evacuations, though I imagine they'd also help if the military had to get a lot of people in or out of the Norfolk/Hampton Roads area quickly.

So that was two-thirds of the Historic Triangle down.