Spent the day in Jamestown, VA

Today started off with heavy rain. It looked awful. I turned on the news and saw that we were under a tornado watch until noon and then the rest of the day was supposed to be beautiful. So we hunkered down and had a very relaxed morning. Nothing to do, no where to go, no schedules to keep. It was a wonderful morning. My mom made scrambled eggs, bacon and toast and life was good.

With all of the long days, short nights and napless days, the little guy was a little worn out. By 9am he was fussy, so I decided to try to get him down for a nap. I was definitely successful! We woke up at 11:45 just as my parents were leaving with the three oldest to go for a walk. I hadn’t intended to sleep, but boy did I ever feel better after my nap! With my parents and the oldest three gone, I showered and then mucked out the car. It definitely needed it. It’s like we’ve been living in it for the last two weeks or something!

After lunch, we decided to head out to Jamestown and do some exploring. That was really neat. The first thing we stopped to do was look at the Glass House. It isn’t really a literal glass house, but it is the remains of the glass kilns from the early Jamestown settlement. And lest that sound too boring, fear not, as there were skilled artisans onsite blowing glass while we watched. That was fascinating! We watched as they took molten glass from the furnace, blew it into a vase, tapped it from the blowing tube, fired it again to shape the mouth, then added a handle. Did you know that the natural color of glass is green and that they have to add cobalt and other things to get the different colors? I had no idea, so the entire visit was certainly educational!

Then we moved on to the original settlement and fort. They have several of the foundations excavated and a museum set up above some of the original Statehouse foundations. When I say over, I mean that the museum is up on pillars and you walk over a glass floor and look down to the foundation. Pretty neat if you ask me! They have recovered over 1 million artifacts from the Jamestown site, and have more than 1 thousand on display, including a skeleton, where they explain how they came to the conclusion as to the identity of the remains.

Anyhow, we saw a lot today, even though the day didn’t start out planned per se. Oh, and the weather? Was perfect…even by my lofty San Diego standards. It was a gorgeous day, 77* with passing fluffy white clouds. Simply amazing, given the rocky start!