On October 7th I went to Virginia because my friend Julia from high school invited me. All during the trip I was constantly reminded that it was quite a surprise I came and it was such a surreal experience. Hahaha if you invite me somewhere I’ll do my best to make it happen. I often post of my travels on Instagram so that’s where everything started. It had been a bit over 7 years since we had last seen each other so I was excited! I have never truly seen Virginia. This trip I also met my penpal Natasha for the first time ever in person. Super exciting stuff. Unfortunately I wasn’t able to bring BB8, but next time I’ll try to make that happen. I hope you enjoy it!
Thursday
I decided to go on Thursday night rather than Friday morning because that meant that I would be able to see more things on Friday (and the plane ticket was cheaper). If you are vaccinated and still nervous about traveling in the USA just know that I don’t think it’s that bad if you are super careful. The plane was once again easy to deal with. Just mask up and don’t cause a fuss. I’ve been to the Baltimore airport many many times going to and from Philmont, but this is the first time that I left the airport! I first went to the rental car place and it was HUGE! There were barely any people inside. When I got to the counter we went over all the usual stuff until the lady behind the desk explained how Hertz charges for tolls. Once again I was lost. Luckily for me they were out of the sedan selection of cars so I had time to google what the hertz toll fee is while I waited 10 minutes for a car. It’s not that bad. Basically $6 a day + whatever tolls you go through. EZ pass with hertz is $17 a day + tolls. (It’s probably faster though) Since they were out of the model car I ordered they upgraded me to a BMW, which I was salty about because I hate BMW drivers (with some exceptions for friends).
Good news though because they ended up switching that out for a really nice Cadillac SUV. It had leather seats and all the extra gadgets. Just like the North Carolina trip it has the CarPlay feature, which I dislike. It had lag time that sometimes makes me miss important turns. Anyways, it’s a great car. Driving to my hotel was a bit sketch. There was a ton of roadwork + a 6 lane highway + at night + I’d never driven here before + 70-80 mph + potential deer. I missed the exit and then had to do a loop, but not a big deal. Finally I got to my hotel and since I hadn’t eaten all day, I went to have dinner at McDonald’s after checking in. I really didn’t do anything on Thursday other than fly into Baltimore and get to my hotel.
Friday
I got up rather early at 7am to get ready to head out at 7:50am for the first stop of the morning. I was on a rather tight schedule like usual and had a lot of stuff in the plan. Some of the national park sites are not your typical monuments, houses, or battlefields and therefore getting the stamp can be a bit of a challenge. To get to the George Washington Memorial Parkway Headquarters you had to of course take the George Washington Memorial Parkway. It was sort of nerve-racking to try to take the exit because it was basically like playing frogger with 2 lanes of 55mph moderate traffic. Glad I timed it right! Inside there were a bunch of stamps for various parks, but I only took the one I came for since I feel like if I take the Arlington House stamp (for example) I wouldn’t have ‘earned’ it and thus would be cheating in a sense. I hope others feel the same way.
Since there wasn’t much to see I quickly got back on the road and went back the other way past my hotel to Manassas National Battlefield Park. National Battlefields are basically just a field and a plaque with occasional cannons, houses, and various reconstructions if you are lucky. You sort of have to use your imagination and envision what happened there 200 years ago. Unfortunately the gift shop was closed because the employee was late, but I managed to get the stamp anyways. This place was actually made up of two battlefields since there were two separate engagements here. In my quest to see everything I went to both.
Next on the List was the Thomas Stone National Historic Site. This one took me about 40 minutes to get to and brought me back into Maryland near the part that nobody visits: the southern tip. I talked to the ranger inside for a bit and he was super informative. Thomas Stone was a lawyer, farmer, and politician. Thomas Stone also was one of the 55 who signed the Declaration of Independence. I got to walk around and see his farm and house while I was there. At the time his house was sort of considered a mansion. He also grew tobacco. That was the only building I could walk in.
Originally I was going to see the Arlington House in the Arlington National Cemetery, but I decided against it because it would (probably) take too much time and I didn’t want to rush. So instead I worked the George Washington Birthplace NM into the plan.
This is not to be confused with Mount Vernon. His birthplace was essentially where the Washington’s grew up generation to generation. It’s hard for me to say what the tour is about without ruining it in some way so I’ll leave it to you to go on it yourself. The house was pretty basic and such being as it’s as close to what Washington himself had. No Xbox! There were also live animals there like a cow, a few horses, and some pigs. I walked around some of the 500 acre property. Back when George’s father owned the land it was 1000 acres. The park service says they are lucky to own even half of it and I have to say I agree. It is very pretty.
Up to this point I hadn’t used the Plate Pass for Hertz at all. I’d managed to not go through any tolls (I believed) up to this point. To get to the Chancellorsville battlefield I either had to go across the Potomac river on this huuuuuge bridge and use an EZ Pass toll or take a vastly more annoying 3 hour non-toll detour through Alexandria. I chose the bridge and boom I was back in Virginia. The plan was to spend an hour at Chancellorsville, but the park ranger thought I was nuts. I wanted to be in Dale City at 6pm to meet Natasha and I thought it would take an hour with google maps. The ranger thought I was a lunatic for thinking it would take an hour on 95-N with 5pm rush hour traffic. He advised to skip the park and leave right away. A bit concerned, I heeded his warnings. What do you know! I got there an hour early just like google maps predicted. To be fair, there was bumper to bumper traffic that seemed to stretch 20 miles going south. I was able to sneak in one more stamp before meeting Natasha by going to Prince William Forrest Park. Since I didn’t actually walk around I will have to return to go hiking so I can fully appreciate the park.
Next was meeting Natasha! We had been writing back and forth for some time now and since I was going to be in the area I thought maybe we should meet up somehow and so, the movie idea was born! We saw the new James Bond: No Time To Die in IMAX. It is terrific! I would 100% recommend you go and see it. By the time the movie ended it was 9pm and we were both really tired so we parted ways. After the movie I drove a wonderful 2 hour 45 minutes to Newport News, VA to check into my hotel. It was a piece of cake to get there. Surprisingly more traffic in Virginia late at night than I thought, but at 80 mph time flies. I arrived at the hotel at about 12am which was the intended time. After talking to the receptionist for awhile I went to bed. Only to discover that while the bed seemed to have been remade, the sheets hadn’t been washed. (Basically there were hairs on it that weren’t mine.) This is the 2nd hotel that I’ve had where this happens and this time I did my research to find a good hotel!! So I was a bit upset. Anyways, this day was packed and in the future I might try to see less and relax more.
Saturday
Well, if I wasn’t wide awake before I am now! The hotel fire alarm went off and it was 5am! Don’t worry, it was just the kitchen cooking breakfast. I thought it was me for a second because I had just used the rest room so I was like “wtf did I do”. I went back to bed after that and got up at 9:30am to start the day.
The first stop was Fort Monroe NM down next to the Atlantic Ocean. It was a very pleasant day with no rain like originally forecasted. I was literally the only person there so I did the museum tour alone. A ton of presidents have been to this fort ranging from Lincoln to Roosevelt to Truman (and a bunch more, I just named a few.) The hallways in the fort get as low as 5’9” so I had to watch my head going through most doorways. Some people showed up after me as I walked around the battlements. Residents of Fort Monroe (town) still live in the Fort NM so you need to be considerate of them. After walking around I went back to the visitors center next to the ocean to get a lighthouse stamp I missed and I got to see an aircraft carrier at the Newport News shipyard, which I thought was really really cool. The next thing on the list was Yorktown Battlefield, which was just a short 35 minutes up the highway.
Yorktown was essentially the last battle of the revolutionary war. George Washington fought against Lord Cornwallis and the British Army until they eventually surrendered, finishing the war. The battlefield is massive and the driving tour took up most of my time. After a relatively short visit to Yorktown I went to Jamestown NM by using the old Colonial Highway. It is a 23 mile scenic road connecting Yorktown to Jamestown. It is amazing when the leaves are changing colors and starting to fall. I didn’t know when I planned out the day, but it was archeology day at the Historic Jamestown. This meant that there was archeologists on site to continue the digging project and answer questions.
First I walked over to the church to listen in on a lecture about the history of the Jamestown archeology dig. Cool lecture, but after about 30 minutes I was bored and hungry so I went to grab a bite to eat in the little cafe next door as I was starving. I got a bag of chips and a blueberry muffin. Lunch of champions! Next I went to see the museum. This museum has all of the artifacts that they found in Jamestown so far. It was pretty cool. After that I headed back to the visitors center to get a patch before continuing the day.
Throughout the day Julia and I messaged back and forth to determine what time I should meet her for dinner in Lynchburg. Originally it was 6pm so that meant I wouldn’t have had time for Petersburg, but something came up on Julia’s end and we changed the time to an 8:30pm meetup. That was ok by me! I will always try to cram as much into a trip as possible *wink* *wink* to those of you that have traveled with me.
After a little over an hour I was at Petersburg National Battlefield. At the visitors center I talked to the rangers for a bit and learned one of them is from Burlington, MA! Small world lol. (She saw my Patriots sweatshirt and that’s how it got brought up.) I asked about the Junior Ranger Booklet since it was written to ask about it on the desk. The park rangers challenged me to complete it and ultimately that’s what made it fun to be at this battlefield. You sort of follow the story of men being slaughtered by cannons and such in the civil war. This is supposedly the battlefield that ultimately cost the South the war. To skip over a long story, the south attacked a fortified stretch of land held by the Union and lost a ton of men which led general Robert E. Lee to lose the battle.
The park is huge and would take several hours to finish seeing. The Junior Ranger Book brings you all the way from the first battlefield about 18 miles to the last one. While I ended up getting lost halfway, because I needed to take a main highway road to the western battlefield, I did end up finishing the packet. So thus I earned the patch.
Something I learned from doing the packet:
It would take me 3 minutes 5 seconds to run full sprint across “no man’s land”? That gave me and my men a 45% chance of success at crossing with ~9 rounds of cannon fire and a bunch of lead coming my way. To get your own time you have to do a 100 ft sprint, then multiply that by 15, then divide that number by 60. Next you add 45 seconds to that for the time it will take you and your men to run through the chevaux-de-frise. (Sharp pointy wooden fence)
Petersburg was probably the best thing I had seen all day with Fort Monroe coming in hot second. It took me about 2.5 hours to get to Lynchburg and since I got there early I went to my hotel first to freshen up before the dinner with Julia. We went to Bootleggers in Lynchburg. It is a burger restaurant with small napkins and really good milkshakes. It was nice to have a long chat with someone that I never thought I would see again. After dinner we parted ways to rest up for Sunday.
Sunday
The original plan was to go see a national park this morning, but when Sunday morning actually arrived I decided to just sleep in as I didn’t want to be super tired on Monday for my flight home. At around 11:30am I left to go pick up Julia from her apartment so we could go adventuring. We had texted back and forth a lot about what to do, but finally we decided on the Caverns at Natural Bridge. This is a cave system that takes you about 340 ft underground making it the deepest on the east coast. It’s located in the mountains of Virginia on a twisting windy road and that’s just the sort of thing that makes driving interesting. After about an hour of driving through numerous sharp blind curves we made it at 1pm. We had a tour scheduled for 3pm since online the 1pm and 2pm were already booked. What the heck do you do here for 2 hours?? (It was sort of waaay out in the mountains with not much around) We managed to move the tour to 2pm which left us an hour to explore.
Why not chill at the Dino Kingdom II adventure park? The reviews were a bit mixed with some people saying “This place is awful” to “You must be crazy to bring your kids here” to “Man this is the best place ever! My kids loved it!” to finally “My god I can’t wait for a park expansion!”. When we arrived Julia was kind of in shock and I was heavily amused. There were a bunch of weird statues on the front lawn. One of them depicted a centaur like chicken with bottom half a chicken and the top half as the body and head of Frankenstein. There were a bunch of other crazy statues, but we were more interested in what lay behind the walls. It cost $15 per person to get in, which was rather steep. Basically some guy named Mark Cline created a comic about dinosaurs attacking the Union army in the civil war. At some point the Union soldiers chloroformed the dinosaurs into submission and used them against the Confederates to turn the tide. It was a very strange comic. You are supposed to make your way around the park as you read the comic. It’s tough to get the whole story by just walking around by yourself. The comic is not really appropriate for kids hahaha, but the park had a ton of kids walking around just the same.
After the dinosaur park Julia and I went back to the Caves. I had been on a few cave tours so it wasn’t much to me, but I think Julia had her mind blown. (It was pretty neat, but no Jewel Cave!) After the cave we went to the Natural Bridge State Park. It was actually giant. I was expecting a small stone arch maybe 30 ft tall. Not a 215 ft tall arch. Really cool! My picture already has 4k views on Google Maps. (I’m up to 1,555,056 total now which I find really exciting)
Since this day was the short day (because I didn’t want to ruin Julia’s sleep schedule and I wasn’t looking forward to waking up early on Monday myself) we drove about an hour back to Lynchburg where we went to dinner at Benny Scarpetta’s Pizza. They are known for HUGE slices. The pizza they sell is 28” diameter and one slice is like 2-3 regular slices. I also had an alcoholic cranberry cider, which was delicious. After dinner Julia and I said our goodbyes and I headed to my hotel for the night. I wish I had my laptop with me because then I probably would’ve written the blog much faster.
Monday
On Monday I left my hotel at about 4:45am and didn’t stop until I reached Fairfax, VA (for gas). The plan was to leave super early to beat the horrible D.C. / Baltimore traffic. I was taking the beltway all the way up to Baltimore so I was a bit unsure what traffic would be like. It turns out it was just a more enjoyable version of Boston traffic at 7:30am. The plan was to see a national park then head to the airport, but I got there about 45 minutes before the park opened so I decided to get breakfast at the Southside Diner near the port of Baltimore. It is the first time I have ever stopped for a real breakfast on one of my trips. After breakfast I drove about ten minutes to Fort McHenry. Turns out getting there at 9am is the most optimum time as they do the flag raising ceremony at 10am each morning. I watched a short video about the bombardment of Fort McHenry, the birth of The Star-Spangled Banner song, and then headed out to the battlements with a bunch of other people. Before the flag raising I got to walk around and see the cannons and go in the buildings. At 10am they started the changing of the flags. Basically from 4pm – 10 am they have a small flag up and from 10am – 4pm they have the big flag with 15 stars. (The flags aren’t up if there is bad weather though.) After leaving McHenry I wasn’t really sure what to do next as I didn’t have enough time to actually see anything so I just headed to the airport and hung out for a few hours. This was a fantastic trip and I will definitely have to return to visit all the things I missed.
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