We all got up nice and early today to do an all-day car drive! Who doesn’t love one of those? We left on time! The iPod continued to play album-oriented rock albums (I’m expanding my kid’s musical awareness). Today we started with The Carpenters and got through The Cars, Chicago, Christopher Cross and DC Talk. The kids were unimpressed – about as impressed as they were going from A – C. We’ll continue with the D’s on Monday.
Once we got out of the police-rich city of Charleston, I set the cruise control for 79MPH, and realized that it was too slow. Today apparently was Nascar day on highway 95; that, or there were a lot of people who thought that the highway 95 sign was the speed limit. This all changed the moment we crossed into Virginia. Suddenly, everybody was doing the speed limit and not a mile over. I’m guessing that while The Carolinas have no police, Virginia has no shortage of them. The multiple speed traps I saw confirmed this.
Greta took us on an interesting “shortcut” today. Google earth had me going down 95 pretty much the entire way, but not Greta Garmin, she took me on some country road that dead-ended at a river. Fortunately, there was a car ferry there, and it was free! We took the 15 minute ride across the waterway and got to see Jamestown from the water. We still got to Williamsburg way, way early – two hours early. Maybe this was a shortcut. I think the high speed driving also contributed.
We went out to a highly recommended restaurant (yelp: 6 Crabs) and for the first time on this trip, we were severely disappointed. None of us liked this fried food. Lunch at Cracker Barrel today was a whole lot better, and that’s pretty basic food. We decided to walk off our greasy dinner by heading down the road to Dunkin’ Doughnuts… except that we couldn’t find it. Both Google Earth and the Dunkin’ Doughnuts website confirmed that the place did exist, but it’s missing in reality. Perhaps this is a very recent change.
The kids swam. We strategized about our long walk tomorrow in the historic downtown. Courtney stubbed her toe on our Dunkin’ Doughnuts walk (she was wearing flip-flops), so now she might have some pain tomorrow.
OK, that missing Dunkin’ Doughnuts thing really bugged me, so about an hour later, we got into the car and went to where everyone said it was. Turns out, it was a display inside a gas station convenience store. We put Greta to the task to find us a real one. It was three miles away right near William & Mary College. The doughnuts were great. Since we were near William & Mary College, we decided to take a driving tour of the place. It was really nice. I also found myself driving through parts of Colonial Williamsburg. I didn’t know you could do that, but I guess you can. Barbara wanted to take many pictures, but the sun was going down. She ended her evening out by going to the campus book store to get a William & Mary shirt. They had a deal – 2 for 1 – so Barbara bought two for herself. Meanwhile, Jeff and I were in the car, illegally parked, waiting for our two women shoppers. I really wanted a shirt too!
When we got home, we swore we saw lightning in the distance, but there had not been a cloud in the sky all day, so we didn’t think this likely. Well, we got to our room, turned on the TV and nearly every channel had a tornado warning for Williamsburg. We, and the rest of the tourists at the Super 8, ran outside with cameras to see if we could catch a glimpse of the tornado, meanwhile, this low, dark ominous cloud was quickly descending upon us. At first there was nothing, then all of the sudden – downpour! We were under a canopy. The other tourists were not; they had to make a run for it. About a minute later, the pitch of the rain changed. It was hail. Courtney grabbed our ice bucket and put it out on the road. She caught numerous quarter inch to half inch nuggets. Alas, through it all, there was no tornado. The tornado touched down in Richmond. We went back inside and watched TV until bedtime.