Norton travels, USA and beyond: Jamestown, Yorktown, DC, and Manassas

We certainly covered a lot of history this week. The two other sites in the Historic Triangle are Jamestown and Yorktown. Jamestown was the site of the first permanent English settlement in America. There is now a visitor’s center/museum, recreated Indian village (remember Pocahontas?), an English village and three ships that are replicas of the ones that arrived here in 1607. Much of the history is told from the writings of John Smith. Yorktown is the battlefield site of Washington’s victory over Cornwallis that ended the Revolutionary War in 1781. There is a nice visitor’s center, recreated settlement and military encampment.

After finishing our Williamsburg experience we moved on to Northern Virginia, near Washington, DC. It should have been a two hour drive, but took quite a bit longer because as we go into the metropolitan area we hit traffic and road work too. The next day we took the Metro train into the city. That was more time consuming and expensive than we had anticipated, then when we got there the line for the National Archives was about two hours. So instead we went to the Smithsonian Museum of US History. It has lots of cool stuff about the presidents, first ladies, military, transportation and more than I can remember. Then we walked around the national mall to see the Washington Monument and Capitol building. Since we’ve been to DC before (this is my fourth time), we skipped most of the other stuff which was overcrowded anyway. Its spring break for lots of families, but you could only tell from the crowds, not from the weather. The cherry blossoms should have been blooming, but most trees are still bare here.

The following day we went out to Dulles Airport where the Smithsonian has a newer Air & Space Museum that holds lots of bigger things that won’t fit in the DC one. Some of the items are the space shuttle Discovery, the Enola Gay, an F-14 Tomcat, a Concorde, and many planes from the beginnings of aviation to the present. It’s a beautiful museum. After that we drove over to Manassas National Battlefield. This was the site of the first battle (also called Bull Run) of the Civil War and the Second Battle of Manassas a year later. It is very sobering to walk around the fields where over 4,000 soldiers died in those two battles. Today we drove to Sykesville, Maryland, just west of Baltimore, visiting some old friends from when we were newlyweds, many years ago.