Mark My Words: Virginia is for lovers

I'm writing this post from Williamsburg, Virginia, where I'm on a family vacation.

My parents are on a three-week road trip, and my sister, my niece, and I flew into Richmond to join them for a week in a timeshare condo. Since "Virginia is for lovers," my sister and I joked about finding boyfriends.

I packed up my stuff this week for my first real vacation in a while. It's the first time I've left Reggie, so I hope he will be OK without us. But when we first got him, he hid from us for a long time, so he'll be fine.

He was sitting in my suitcase while I was packing, like he wanted to stow away. Jimmy used to sleep on top of this suitcase, so it still has some of his hairs on it.

We had a red-eye flight into JFK Airport in NYC. My carry-on was slightly too big for the overhead bins, so I was embarrassed when I had to check it. I knew I wouldn't be able to sleep on the flight; I never can. And just as I got to a point where I might have slept, we hit the worst turbulence I have ever experienced on a flight--since I was half-asleep, I thought we were all going to die.

(My dad's laptop doesn't have a number pad, so I can't do the keyboard code [ALT+0151] for an em dash, so you get those two hyphens. I could copy and paste from another website, but that sounded like too much work. But now this paragraph was probably more work than copying and pasting. But I hope you find it funny and/or interesting!)

(And speaking of my dad's laptop, I was amused to see that one of his Chrome bookmarks is a Google search for "potato chips health benefits."

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Eventually we got into our second flight into Richmond, which was prettier as we flew above the coast, but this time I was sleepier.

My parents picked us up and drove us to our condo. I napped for around four hours since I was so sleep deprived. We really just relaxed and used the condo pool momentarily before a thunderstorm aborted our plans.

Then today we headed to some historic sites in Yorktown. It's not my preferred activity for a Sunday, but you pick your battles. Or battlegrounds in this case, since that's where we went.

We went to the American Revolution Museum at Yorktown, which had indoor exhibits about conditions in eighteenth-century America and the end of the Revolutionary War, since apparently it ended in Yorktown. Since both of my jobs are almost exclusively in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, it's nice to spend some time in the eighteenth. I thought the museum was really well done and balanced and nuanced. But the parts about the war don't really interest me. Military history really isn't my thing. I think that's why I (thought I) didn't like history in high school and college--it was all about wars.

TFW you have a master's in history and two history jobs but are bored at the history museum

They also had an outdoor exhibit area, which reminded me of my work at This Is the Place, but overall this museum seemed more polished. There was a cat that came up to us, and I was able to kneel down and pet it! So that was the highlight for me.

They also had some dyer's woad, and my instinct was to pull up the invasive weed. But they were deliberately growing it as part of a demonstration about using plants for textiles.

Then we went to a National Park Service site, Yorktown Battlefield. This one was more about the war. Like, I really don't care what direction the troops went or what Cornwallis said when he surrendered. But I'm glad other people have that thing they like, even if it's not for me.

(Speaking of things that are not for me, when I was in fifth grade, I went through an awkward phase where I was obsessed with chess, even though I was terrible at it, and I even started collecting chess sets. Now it doesn't interest me at all. But the gift shop did have a cool themed chess set.

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Then we drove around Yorktown to see different sites from the past, such as the redoubts from the war and the Moore House. These were more interesting to me, even if I don't need all the details of who went where.