It all started with Getty Images. I was shopping through Colonial Williamsburg stock photos for a work project and completely minding my own business when I started to think, These are really nice photos. Never mind that the last time I went to Williamsburg I was in fifth grade and Completely UninterestedTM in American history. I hope the Williamsburg marketing team is happy, because their photos work. Fast-forward a few minutes and These are really nice photos turned into I want to go to Williamsburg, which turned into I bet I can drag my friends to Williamsburg. Four months later, I packed my friends and their suitcases into my little car and drove us down to Williamsburg during a weekend so hot that the weather people were literally telling everyone to barricade themselves in their houses. This turned out to be the last straw for my poor little car, which had been ailing for some time and started smelling like gas on the way down. That’s what I get for dragging a 17-year-old car on a road trip in 115° weather I’m sorry babyyyyyyy T_T
Anyway, my friends have better sense than I do, so instead of the two-day Williamsburg tour we’d planned we spent most of our time at our resort. Full disclosure: until July, I’d never set foot in a resort and in fact kind of assumed that resorts were built for snooty people who hung around pools all day and could afford to pay $10000000 per night and oh gawd I was wrong it was delightful and I have literally no idea what I’ve been doing with my life and also I probably drank way more pink lemonade than was good for me.
Yes, I really did buy one of those pretty straw hats.
Friday
MORE LIKE FRI-YAY okay I’ll show myself out now. We set out in high spirits, which were only slightly dampened by the increasingly unreliable AC. In retrospect, I’m amazed my car survived the 400-mile drive. About halfway to Williamsburg we stopped at a cute little café for a lunch/bathroom/AC break.
Ways We Knew We Were In The South:
- Pancake-eating contest.
- I paid $7 for lunch, including tip. For context, I later paid $9.89 for much lower-quality food at a DC McDonald’s. Ports and storms and so forth.
After lunch we carried on and made it to the resort without mishap. I started my first-ever resort visit by taking pictures of the bathroom to send to my mom. Naturally.
I ACTUALLY BROUGHT SHAMPOO WITH ME BUT IT WENT UNTOUCHED BECAUSE THIS IS SERIOUSLY COOL I MEAN LOOK AT ITTTTTTTTTT
The view from our balcony:
View of the marina:
And the room key, because I have zero chill:
In our original itinerary we were supposed to be shopping at this point but it was hot af so we hung out in the room for a bit and then went to dinner at a Benjamin Franklin-themed restaurant called Food for Thought. I’m not even joking.
The wait was about an hour but while we were waiting one of the chefs came around with a platter of stuffed mushrooms and handed out samples and omg they were so good.
I unfortunately didn’t get any good pictures of my dinner because it was not photogenic, so we’re stuck with bread and dessert shots. TRAGIC.
Saturday
This was supposed to be Williamsburg Day. Owing to murderous temperatures, it turned into Chill at the Resort Day.
YOU GUYS THEY BROUGHT US FOOD. I HAVE NEVER HAD FOOD BROUGHT TO ME AT A POOL. (Quick disclaimer: It wasn’t free, obvs, BUT STILL. FOOD. POOL. MIND BLOWN.) I haven’t been to a pool in years, partly because I’m lazy but mostly because I don’t have a swimsuit body (shocking, I know), but luckily it’s nothing a cute cover-up can’t fix! We spent the morning at the outdoor pool, and it was soooooo nice. One of the biggest attractions of this particular resort, at least for me, was that they have a lazy river and omg it was so fun and so relaxing. I ended up going around the river twice by choice and once more against my will because it took me a while to figure out how to get back out of the gorram inner tube /fail. We even went into the hot tub, which was also really nice, because it made the regular pool feel almost cold. After lunch we shuffled over to the indoor sports club/spa, where I got a pedicure from a super nice tech who said I had cute nails. 😀
I ended up having to wait a bit to get my pedicure owing to lack of planning on my part, but it’s been over a month and my nail polish is still in really good shape so I’d say it was totally worth it, and at least that gave me some time to sit down with Jo Nesbø’s Hogarth Shakespeare Macbeth rewrite. (Side note: he did an amazing job and the book had a lot of characters and scenes I don’t remember and now I’m going to have to reread the actual play because apparently Shakespeare really did have characters named Caithness and Seyton??? idk, I haven’t read the play since eleventh grade.)
Anyway, the indoor pool was lovely and had its own hot tub, and we had a very pleasant afternoon out of the heat. I would’ve liked to have spent more time at the pool, but we had reservations at one of the Williamsburg taverns, so we caught a free (!!!) shuttle back to our room – again, because I’m lazy – and headed out to dinner.
We started with Sally Lunn bread and YOMMMMMM. It was served with a kind of herby butter, pickled beans, and something that I think they called ham relish? It didn’t sound like a great idea, but it sure tasted amazing.
Then Heather and I decided to try the peanut soup, even though she usually doesn’t like peanuts, just for the experience. It was liquefied peanut butter with bread. It tasted like dan dan noodles without the noodles. I don’t really get it, but it wasn’t bad.
Heather’s citrus-roasted game hen, which came with butternut squash potato mash, pan jus, and golden raisin agrodulce:
The rest of us ordered the same thing because we’re boring. We all got the “chop of shoat,” which was a whiskey-maple brined pork chop with butternut squash-potato mash, tart apple compote, and whiskey pork jus. Can you tell I’m just typing up what’s on the menu pics on their Yelp page? Part of my pork chop made it home but the butternut squash mash did not because yummm :3
Sparkling apple cider, because I’m a sucker for sparkling apple cider:
The syllabub was highly recommended by Yelp so I had to try it even though I don’t like wine. It was good, but I could definitely taste the wine, which was kind of a con for me. The strawberries and cream were reeeeeeally nice, though.
And a random sheepie that we saw on the way to dinner because I like sheepies:
After dinner we went back to the room, where we for some unfathomable reason ended up watching Bridesmaids, which I’ve never watched before and have no intention of watching ever again. No offense to anyone who likes it, but whiny characters don’t do it for me, sorry.
Sunday
WE FINALLY MADE IT TO WILLIAMSBURG. Okay admittedly it was more that we swung by on the way home but I am actually proud of us because we ended up spending a lot more time tramping around Williamsburg than I thought we would. We started with the Governor’s Palace, because that was what I was ogling the most on Getty.
I’m not sure if this is a really small piano or a really small harpsichord, but either way I took a picture of the music like a total dork and will probably try to play it at some point cus I’m nosy and I wanna know what it is #headdesk
This one I know is a harpsichord:
Creepy fact I wish I didn’t know: Those spots on their cloaks aren’t part of the fur. The cloaks were made out of ermine fur. Ermines have white fur and black-tipped tails. Every black spot represents a dead ermine. The more spots you had, the richer you were.
After the creepy paintings, we walked to the apothecary, where I had a quick ice cream break and bought some cookies and some chocolate (I’m only human), then went to a couple of shops.
After poking around the shops we went to the courthouse and the magazine, where we got to listen a bit to the historical guides. Whoever is in charge of staffing Williamsburg did a really good job, because the guides were all funny, engaging, and fun to listen to.
Final historical stop: the printing office. I took a professional interest in the printing process and ended up with a disproportionate number of printing pictures. Sorry not sorry.
FONTSSSSSSSSSS. Capital letters were kept in the upper case and non-capital letters in the lower case, hence upper- and lower-case letters. #typenerd
And the pretty little bridge that we crossed when my friends finally succeeded in dragging me away from the printing office:
I don’t have any pictures of the last places we visited because my phone was pretty much dead by this point (apparently I didn’t think charging it was really important?), but we hit up another shop, where I bought my hat, then shuttled back to the visitor’s center, where we looked through the gift shops and I bought a shirt and another lemonade. Look I’m not proud of myself okay ;_;
After we left Williamsburg we went to the nearest McDonald’s for a late lunch, then made a beeline for a Yankee Candle store recommended by Karen and when we got there I was really sorry my phone was dead because it was basically a mall. I always thought Yankee Candle only sold, you know, candles, but boy was I wrong. I don’t know if this is their flagship store or what but it had a handful of different shops and stalls selling candles, kitchenware, ornaments, toys, jewelry, clothes, unicorn gardens, soup mixes, etc. There was an entire Christmas section, complete with a little curved bridge, a street lamp that made me think we were in Narnia, and FAKE SNOW??? I just about lost my mind when I saw that fake snow swirling around the lamp omfg it was AMAAAAAAZING. Heather didn’t catch the snow the first time around, so we sat by the lamp post for four minutes until the snow came back and it was totally worth it. The ceiling was a lovely dark blue with little white lights for stars and it reminded me of the Great Hall in Hogwarts yeah okay I’m a nerd but you knew that. Next time we go that far south I’m going back to the Yankee Candle store and I’m bringing a fully charged phone this time cus holy shit that was amazing. And I was trying so hard not to spend more money, but then I got to the discount section and I somehow walked out with two gorgeous pumpkin mugs. I actually don’t feel too bad about those because they were 50% off, so I got the pair of them for something like $12.
This sort of has a happy ending, at least as far as my faithful little car is concerned, because we left her resting in as much shade as we could find while we were off frolicking around Williamsburg, and luckily when we got back to the parking lot she was still sheltered pretty well. I was worried about our leftovers, which we’d wrapped up in a plastic laundry bag and packed into the cooler with a lot of loose ice, but those made it back pretty much intact, and we even still had most of the ice by the time we got home. Of course, the car still smelled like gas, but she got us home safely (following further adventures at an Outback Steakhouse and a Wegmans), which after the outrageous abuse I inflicted on her over the course of the weekend was a little bit more than I could’ve reasonably asked.
tl;dr
Williamsburg was awesome and I wanna go back. Preferably during the off-season, when I maybe won’t kill my car driving 400 miles in 115° heat. And also not in a 17-year-old car.
Bonus Blogging Mishaps
I went to insert the palace/courthouse/magazine/printing office pics and couldn’t find them in my media library because I apparently never uploaded them. GOOD JOB, ME.
