Yorktown Day Trippin' to the Past

You guuuuys, this place is legit!

If you want to see what it was like to live in one of the colonies just as the revolution was about to begin, come to Yorktown's newest American Revolution Museum.  They have a portion set up so you can walk through a soldiers camp, including the camp's "kitchen", the soldiers' tents, captain's quarters, and medical facilities (let me just say "yikes"), a traditional colonial house and farm with crops, live chickens, ducks, dried tobacco leaves, and slaves homes.  Beyond this, is a brand new musuem housing some of the true artifacts of the war, several extensive and easy to follow exhibits that display each battle, each person's life style, facts about both sides views on the war and two very large theaters with excellent films - one is a surround screen (almost half circle) amphitheater that had us wondering why aren't all movie theaters like this?

The young man in the lower left picture was a soldier and camp cook. He knows way more about 18th century living than I could ever imagine and started a fire with nothing but some sticks, dried grass, and piece of metal in less than a minute.  He showed us how to make an an earthen stove!

Punishment at the campsites included sitting on this "horse" for days as well as lashings. :-/

Pretending to be a tobacco farmer, having dried all my leaves in the barn with my fancy hat.

We managed to forget taking more photos of the actual inside of the museum because we were quite enthralled with all of the exhibits.  It's a pretty big place and you need several days to really get through it all.  We did, however, manage to sneak one photo of the round screen theater! Many thanks go out to Nan for taking us to the American Revolution Museum!