Meet Virginia: Day One

So this past weekend, Taryn, Kathy and I traveled to southeastern Virginia to engage in general merriment. We left early Sunday morning. McKenna was a little confused - she's very used to being left at my house when Taryn leaves with suitcases; however, when I brought one out, she was a little freaked.
Taryn, the master packer, managed to fit all of our stuff, as well as McKenna's stuff, into my car with room to spare.
With everyone in the car, we set off for our first stop: my parents' house, where McKenna had reserved a room for the next few days. She was a bit perplexed - I'm convinced that dog can figure out the direction of the car, and knows when she's going somewhere new.
However, once we arrived and McKenna saw the size of my parents' yard as compared to mine, she brightened up a bit. According to my mother, she and Holly got along very well during her visit; they chased squirrels and flirted with the young stud next door and had a wonderful time.

Once we left McKenna, we set out through Virginia, making only short pit stops at Starbucks for breakfast and at Target to buy a new ipod radio adaptor to replace the crappy one I had, which was broken. After we got out of northern Virginia (where there was surprisingly little traffic!), we stopped at a Subway in a gas station for lunch.
This was quite an interesting place. The Subway advertised a monstrous sandwich known as "The Feast,"
and the gas station advertised plenty of "Clean Restrooms." I suppose, as opposed to dirty ones? Which, why would you advertise that? Is it implying that they're dirty if they don't use an adjective?

On the way to our hotel in Williamsburg, we stopped at a few plantations. The first, called the Shirley Plantation, was rather entertaining. The house and grounds were lovely, of course, but it was the company that made the experience what it was. First, we bought tickets in the gift shop, and learned that they had a contest to name their baby chickens. Of course, we suggested a list of Dynasty-inspired names. Hopefully they will choose our entry, and Fallon and Alexis will be running around the Shirley Plantation for years to come.
Next, we met our tour group on the steps of the main house. It was there that we met our tour guide, a knowledgeable lady close to our age. She complimented our chick name entry, so we immediately liked her. However, the poor girl had to deal with the rest of our tour group, which contained a handful of old foreign people who persisted in asking useless and/or inappropriate questions.
One such gentleman asked if the plantation had slaves. When this fact was confirmed, he proceeded to ask questions about the slaves using words that nice people do not say. Hopefully, he just was unaware of the inappropriateness of these words, as he was clearly from another culture, but either way, it did not set a nice tone. To the tour guide's credit, she did keep things moving briskly after that question.
The same group was also quite enthralled with the plastic food that was set out throughout the grounds to illustrate what colonial people ate. Now, as you all well know, I am plenty enthralled with bacon, but not to the point that I'd hold up the tour to discuss a fake version of it (which I think should be called 'facon') with the poor tour guide.
After the tour, we went outside to view the grounds. There was a lovely view of the river,
the smoke house,
other plantation animals (including a exhibitionist goat who stuck his posterior into most of my pictures),
and our personal favorite, a kid on a leash (who at one point, did a face plant walking out of a building. Don't worry, he was fine.)

After we left Shirley, we went to another James River plantation called Berkeley Plantation, the birthplace of William Henry Harrison. This plantation was also beautiful, with a huge old main house
and extensive grounds that offered lovely views of the river,
as well as some hay that we think was just there as a prop (as it was growing foliage).
There was a very informative tour of the main house, and our tour group was much larger than at Shirley. None of the people in this group used any racial slurs (accidentally or not), which was nice, although some people did have trouble following the directions not to touch anything. One room has a shawl that was said to belong to William Henry Harrison; in fact, the tour guide said that rumor has it that he used it during his last few weeks of life. Despite the fact that it was likely teeming with 200 year old germs, and that it was ancient and probably very fragile, one lady decided it was OK to touch the thing as soon as the tour guide moved on. Niiiiice.

After the tour, we wandered down to the James River.
There were a bunch of flowers along the paths that were in full bloom,
as well as one lonely, tiny, empty colonial vodka bottle that someone has graciously left to decorate the landscape.
There was also a willow tree that tried to attack Taryn.

After the vicious willow tree attack, we set off toward Williamsburg and our hotel. After checking in, we headed back out to Yorktown to see what was going on. We walked past a concert in the yard of Grace Episcopal Church,

and went to the Riverwalk to search for a place for dinner. We ended up at the Riverwalk Restaurant, which was right on the York River.

We all got various salads, which came on super cute fish-shaped plates.

After dinner, we wandered around the area, looking for places to take pictures.

It was still early when we left Yorktown, so we decided to go play miniature golf. Pirate Mini Golf was down the street from our hotel, so we headed over.

It was pretty crowded, and we ended up waiting awhile before we were able to start.

At one point, Taryn made quite an impressive hit...so impressive, in fact, that her ball went all the way off the green and down a waterfall. We had to share balls after that.

There were some interestingly designed holes...such as this one, which had two protruberances blocking the hole.

We took the game very seriously, though, lost balls and strange green bumps included.

Finally, we finished the game and retired to our hotel for the evening, to rest up for a busy Monday.

***For Meet Virginia: Day Two, click here***