Monday, July 14 — We were still confused about Colonial Williamsburg. According to what we’d read online, we needed to buy tickets to see the historic town at the Regional Visitor’s Center, which was about 3/4 of a mile away from the historic district (by car, not as the bird flies). The visitor’s center opened at 1000. We pulled into the parking lot promptly at 1000, and it was packed. Parking cost $10, and it was a flat fee for the entire day.

Inside the center, there was a fairly long line to purchase tickets, which were $35 per person for 13 and up. The cashier gave us a map and explained that there was more to see and do than could be done in one day and that we needed to decide on what we wanted to see and plan our day in advance. When we asked for clarification of what exactly it was that we were going to see, he explained that the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation owned several of the buildings in the historic downtown. Their buildings had been restored to look as they had in 1775. Inside, there were actors dressed in costumes of the era explaining the history of their particular building, with the focus being on the years between 1699 (when Williamsburg became the capital of Virginia) and 1776 (just as the Revolutionary War began). Anybody could walk around the historic downtown for free and look at the buildings, but only ticket holders could go inside of the foundation’s buildings. All the buildings on the map were color coded to identify which buildings were owned by the foundation. There were several buildings that were not owned by the foundation which were open to the general public, mostly shops and restaurants. Some of those venues had their employees dressed up in period costumes, too. We later found out that not every foundation building was open every day; if it had a flag out front, then visitors knew it was open.

There was no museum in the visitor’s center like there had been at Jamestown, but there was a 70-minute movie. We decided to save the movie for the end of the day. We followed the signs out to the exit, where we could either take a walking trail to the historic area or take a bus. It was blazing hot, so we opted for the bus. We waited about 10-minutes. There was a long line, and we lucked out and got some of the last seats. According to the map, the bus did a loop around the outer edges of the 3/4 mile historic area, with multiple stops along the loop.

We decided to get off at stop 1, the governor’s palace. From the bus stop at the main road, we followed a small foot path to a smaller paved road. We passed this along the path, but the map didn’t specify what it was and the color indicated that it didn’t belong to the foundation.