We left Columbus, GA after Rotary on Wednesday, July 20 after a smashingly successful 90th birthday celebration for G'ma Mary, reunion with Bryan, Daniel, Katie, their spouses, our 6 grandkids, Kirk's brother and his wife and two of their adult kids and Nate's wife (20 in all), as well as a smashingly successful breakage of my foot.
Off to Charleston, SC, a place neither of us had previously visited. In addition to appreciating Charleston's contribution to our colonial beginnings, it was to be my opportunity to add SC to my collection of ridden-in states.
Kirk enjoyed a walking tour of the old city while I traveled much of the same by bus with Marvin, the bus guide. Being only 5 days post broken foot truly limited my freedom to explore. We'll need to return soon to SC for me to lay down some two-wheeled tracks in SC.
Williamsburg was foundational to sustaining us as a couple in 1968. Kirk graduated from Davidson College in June of that year and was sent to Ft. Benjamin Harrison in Indianapolis for US Army Officer Training. I had graduated from Indiana University a year earlier and was working at the IU Medical Center also in Indianapolis. We both attended a Young Adult Group at North United Methodist Church September 14th. A spark of magic happened between us that night; we got together a week later, September 21st and then off to Springfield, MA he went to serve his 2 years at the local AFEES. He gave us a 20% chance of ever seeing each other again.
Two weeks later my parents invited me to join them for a birthday weekend in Williamsburg. I accepted the invite if this guy I had met could come, too. He came, we fell in love, I moved to MA 7 months later, and we were married in Chautauqua, NY 10-1/2 months after first meeting. But it was Williamsburg where we fell in love, a love that has just deepened over the next 42 years.
The Willimasburg Plantation, was about 5 miles from historic colonial Williamsburg and PERFECT space and amenities-wise for us to settle in for a week after being on the road for a month and either being in a different bed nearly every night or being "on" with family and friends.
A wheelchair was my means of transportation. Good thing Kirk likes to get his walking steps so pushing me wasn't a total drag.
Neither of us remembers much about or formal Williamsburg visiting from 42 years ago, but the gratifying addition has been the daily inclusion of re-enactments of colonial life from the perspective of the enslaved Africans.
The real-feel temp every day we were in Williamsburg was 105-115. Our African-American guides gathered us around them in the tobacco and cotton fields, in the heat, telling the story of 16 hour days bent over picking cotton, taking us to a tree and whipping it as the Masta would whip the slave for the least provocation, taking us to a 12 x 20' hut where 10 enslaved would crowd together to sing-heal each others spiritual and physical wounds and ready for the morrow, imploring what would we do if the Masta announced his daughter was getting married? More often than not some of the enslaved's children would be given to the Bride as a wedding gift. The parents and children would likely never again see each other.
A couple of side trips completed our tour of the Williamsburg Triangle: a visit to Yorktown, where on October 19, 1781, the decisive military campaign of the American Revolution culminated with the British surrender to combined American and French forces under the command of George Washington; and a visit to Jamestown, the site where in 1607 104 men and boys landed 13 years before the Pilgrims arrived in Massachusetts, completed the Williamsburg Triangle.
One of several Colonial Taverns serving period meals.
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