Visiting St Jamestown - Colonial Williamsburg, Virginia

We had seen the first landing beaches in Virginia Beach, but the first settlers, sent by the British Virginia Company, chose the location for their permanent settlement more than 100 km further along the St James riverbanks.  

St Jamestown

The tiny village surrounded by swamps had a hard time to survive, but persisted mainly thanks to more settlers shipped from England to the USA, including some women (who weren't present on the first 3 ship).

Anyway, St Jamestown is currently no more than an archaeological site. You need a little imagination to picture what the first settlement was like, how they were starving the first years, how it ended up growing after all and how it got abandoned and destructed in the end.  Well, the latter I could imagine as it seemed an awful swampy place where I could not imagine getting the needed agriculture up and running to be successful in the long run.

I was surprised to hear that this is the historic place where Pocahontas lived. I must admit that I've never seen the movie and I guess I was probably most surprised that Pocahontas was more a historic figure than Aladin.  Well, as probably everybody except myself knows, she was an Powhatan princess and got married to John Rolfe,  one of the leaders.  She traveled with him back to the UK where she died and is buried.

The children didn't know Pocahontas story either (otherwise I would have known it) so that couldn't trigger their interest. But they were busy chasing squirrels, running through the church ruins and on our way back to the car, we got a glimpse of a few deer in the park.

Colonial Williamsburg

A few kms further is Williamsburg that became for about 100 years the colonial state capital of Virginia, once St Jamestown was of no importance anymore.  Currently the historic city is preserved and turned into a very touristic living-history museum.  For my Belgian readers: compare it to Bokrijk: dressed-up guides, carriages riding around, demonstrations of old crafts, ...

We took the guided tour of the Governor's palace, the residence of the royal governor in the Britisch colony of Virginia. When the guide found out we were from Belgium, she picked Kabouter to be her help and he was assigned a special spot on a tile of Belgian marble in the floor. Kabouter however had no clue what was going on :D.
 

After our tour we explored the city further with visits to craft demonstrations etc, but we avoided the other guided tours to allow our children the freedom to explore at their pace. Still there was plenty to do at our own pace.  

Unfortunately a rain shower and a filled diaper made us hop on the shuttle bus back to our car sooner than we had anticipated as we had somehow brainlessly left all of our bags in the car.  I had assumed the parking lot was always within a few minutes walking distance from the historic district, but that is not the case.  Other than that, colonial Williamsburg is a very family-friendly fun day activity to visit.