Markers of History

Museum
Colonial National Historical Park
Yorktown Visitor Center

Location: Foot of Colonial Parkway, Yorktown, VA 23690

Visited: July 4, 2009, 11:45am

My impres­sions: Not much in the way of pho­tog­ra­phy for this one: I don’t like to take pho­tographs (even flash-free) in muse­ums unless I’ve researched their pho­tog­ra­phy poli­cies ahead of time. Since I didn’t real­ize there was a museum here, I hadn’t done any research.

The main pur­pose of stop­ping here was, I think, to get my wife’s Access Pass to the National Parks. And we were both pleas­antly sur­prised at the ease with which that hap­pened. After that, we stopped at the gift shop and I got my National Parks expe­ri­ence off on the right foot with the pur­chase of an Explorer’s Edition parks pass­port. So, we duti­fully stamped my pass­port and then headed through the museum. It was inter­est­ing to see the cam­paign tent (pic­tured in the pre­vi­ous link) and some of the arti­facts, includ­ing part of a neat dis­play that tried to show the events that took place there, using a model of the bat­tle­field, lights, and narration.

We didn’t take in any of the bat­tle­field itself: being the 4th of July, the place was VERY busy. (In fact, we heard one of the NPS employ­ees tell another cou­ple who was ask­ing about the audio dri­ving tour that any other day, he would rec­om­mend it, but given the busy­ness that day and a cou­ple of road clo­sures, this was the one day of the year that he would not rec­om­mend it.)

But this was far from the end of our his­tory for the day. Tomorrow, we’ll start down the Colonial Parkway towards Williamsburg and Jamestown.

Markeroni sta­tus: Not yet logged.