So after almost 8 hours of driving, I’m home in New Jersey. I drove to my mom’s to get my dogs and then just decided I needed to go home. I have stuff to do and I didn’t want two days wasted with driving.
The ghost tour in Williamsburg was a disappointment. It wasn’t bad, it just hadn’t been updated. I will admit the guide I had didn’t do much for me either, he was far too young in my opinion and didn’t have the experience. I did this same tour (with the same company) 14-15 years ago, and what bothered me is that they told the same stories again! The stories are good, and all based on a book called “The Ghosts of Williamsburg.” The problem is the book was put together in the 60s and a lot of the accounts were from people back then. They haven’t added anything new in, which is what I would have liked to have heard.
The other issue was it ran late, which I wouldn’t normally complain about, but I had parked in the visitors center as to not have to hunt for parking downtown. So rather than enjoy the tour I started near the end looking at the time and realizing I might be doing a long walk. I missed the last bus, which I tried hard to catch, even leaving the tour early. Thus I had to walk back . . . . alone . . . . in the dark . . . . the very pitch black dark. It’s colonial Williamsburg, they don’t have much street lighting! The walk back was scarier than the ghost tour, and I ended up running part of the way as I did not enjoy the whole “path through the woods and the croaking frogs in the nearby swamp.” I kept imagine someone waiting for a stupid tourist like me to come along so they could mug.
Next time I’m going to take a competing company’s ghost tour, as I heard some of their tour earlier in the day and they gave what I wanted to hear, recent accounts from building curators and reenactors of the ghosts.
This morning I did Jamestown, which I loved. So much has been done there and gone up since I was last there because of the 400th anniversary of the settlement and the discovery of the original settlement. There is an entirely new archaeology museum there, which unfortunately I only breezed through as I was running overtime and needed to get on the road. They also had a field school there excavating and I talked to some of them about the stuff they were finding and whatnot.
I’ll upload all my Williamsburg and Jamestown photos this weekend. I have a lot, so I’ll stick them in my webshots photo album rather than on the blog itself.