Spring break

Lots has been happening here lately, so I will try to fill everyone in:

We ended up having a fantastic spring break. Took Rachel to Colonial Williamsburg for the first part of it. On the drive down, she mentioned that she was feeling really carsick. We offered to pull over, but she insisted on continuing the drive, because "I want to get as much out of it as possible." Well, all of a sudden she just threw up in the back seat of Drew's car (he notes that the few times Rachel has thrown up in the car, it's always in his vehicle). We pulled to the side of the busy road, hauled her out and wiped down the car seat and had her change clothes. Most of the vomit was in the cup holder, so I had to mop that up. Rachel kept apologizing over and over -- she sounded terrified that we'd be angry -- but we reassured her that everything would be okay, that these things happen, that Mommy and Daddy weren't mad, etc.

We arrived at our hotel a little later after Drew stopped at 7-11 to buy some detergent and paper towels. As soon as we checked in, I marched up to our room, pulled Rachel's clothes out of the plastic bag we had found, surprisingly, in the car (mental note: Pack a full box of Ziploc bags whenever we go on trips) and used the foul-smelling hotel soap to rinse everything. Then we wiped Rachel down and headed to the colonial grounds.

We got into a tour of the Governor's Palace, which was quite lovely and Rachel kept raising her hand to volunteer answers to the tour guide's questions. Unfortunately a lot of the artisan shops were closed, although I did manage to find a store that sold ginger cookies. No, Mom and Dad, they don't give them out free anymore -- apparently the Va. Health Department was appalled at that practice and stopped it in the 1980s after our trip there.

We went to dinner at one of the taverns, where we were seated with another family with a young boy from Maryland (it was group seating) and we managed to have a pretty decent meal -- mine was a shepherd's pie that was quite tasty. Entertainers played early American music, and the atmosphere really seemed to replicate Colonial life.

The next day we continued playing a game called "Revolutionary (Rev) Quest," which is an incredibly cool game in which kids are Patriot spies and are given a map and decoding instructions and guided to various "dead drops" and meet ups with fellow spies, done through "secret messaging devices" (smartphones). At the end of the game you get a silver token and profuse thanks for delivering a much-needed message to a commander on the Patriot side. You also get a cool black scarf with white Rev Quest lettering that you can take home.

We also bought Rachel an adorable Colonial-era dress with a sash and a mobcap. She seemed most interested in the mobcap -- it made her look absolutely adorable -- and found a good restaurant for lunch outside the village on the way to William & Mary. Unfortunately it took 45 minutes to get seated and then another hour for lunch, which got Drew upset because it seemed all we did was eat and shop, but I explained to him that Rachel and I really need to eat lunch when the hotel breakfast is woefully inadequate (as it was in this case), so he calmed down. Turns out lunch was so big that we ended up eating more of a snack than dinner at a Crackel Barrel restaurant near our hotel, a move we instantly regretted because Cracker Barrels are AWFUL. But by that time we'd had a full day, so we didn't care.

On our last day, we got to tour a working farm that had been closed the day before. The weather was perfect and Rachel got to try her hand at hoeing. She also finished the RevQuest game, and then we chased her through a nearby hedge maze until it was time to head home. On the way back and forth from the visitor's center is a walkway that has stones with things written on them that take you backward and forward in time. From the visitor's center: 1980: your computer is your brain, and so on through history: 1860: You know people who own other people, and then other dates that say, "Your news is a week old," and "You cannot travel more than 70 miles overland in a day," etc. until 1760: You are subjects of His Majesty the King." A sobering reminder of where we came from -- and then, on the other side of the walkway, stones that take us forward in time: "Ask now what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country," until the last one: "What mark will YOU make?"