Occam's Razor

My blogging has been delayed by an overdue family reunion. Months in the planning, all but one of my siblings and most of our spouses met in southern Virginia, our first get together since my father’s funeral in 2016.

We chose what turned out to be a beautiful but eclectic rental house on the James River near Spring Grove, Virginia. This manor house was built in 1885 and is part of a larger Baptist Edge Christian Camp. Most of us were not aware of its rules, which included no alcohol with the threat of immediate eviction if we imbibed on the campus. It didn’t stop us from drinking several bottles of wine while we were there, but we were discreet enough to put the empty bottles in our cars for disposal off campus. The alcohol prohibition seemed quite odd, as if these Christians were unaware that Jesus drank wine at the Last Supper. Also, we found wine glasses in the cupboard.

The house itself was in need of a lot of maintenance but was certainly functional and included a large kitchen, dining room, parlor and a large enclosed deck with lots of tables for playing cards. It was a mini Tara and scratched whatever itch I had to live on a plantation for a while. It stands on a bluff overlooking the James River and was so far off the beaten path that Hooterville would have been a major metropolis. The closest town of Surry was a 20 minute drive away. You had to drive many a poorly marked back road that turned into an unpaved stretch, then take a “road” around a tree to get on the campus.

The Tidewater area of Virginia is pretty amazing. It sits at the mouth of Chesapeake Bay. The James River is just one of three major rivers that flow into the area. (These include the York and Rappahannock rivers.) Most rivers tend to be pretty narrow, but it’s hard to find a stretch of these rivers less than a mile across. So if you are a boater, it’s an ideal location to live as there are waterways everywhere as well as access to the Atlantic Ocean if you want to go that far. It’s also likely to be severely impacted by climate change. Sea levels are already rising, making my sister’s house in Poquoson a likely future casualty. Fortunately, she expects to move from the area within a few years to higher ground.

There’s a lot of history to be found in the area. One of the first places we visited was Jamestown, right across the river from us, accessed by the Jamestown-Scotland Ferry which runs every half hour. Jamestown was the first permanent English settlement in North America. Settled by venture capitalists in England, it was never financially successful. Early colonists died of hunger, disease and malnutrition. But it endured, which makes it historically significant. Technically though the first European settlement in North America happened in St. Augustine, Florida. It just took a couple of hundred years for the title to pass from the Spanish to Great Britain and then to the United States.

One of the areas downsides is its traffic. It took us more than an hour to get to any site from our house. The dearth of bridges across the James and York rivers make traveling tedious, as did the frequent traffic congestion. Williamsburg, Newport News, Yorktown and Hampton are all on a peninsula between the York and James Rivers, further limiting mobility. The Colonial Parkway at least makes for a scenic road to get between places. After Jamestown, we took it to tour Yorktown.

As you should recall, the Revolutionary War ended at Yorktown. A French fleet bollixed up the British fleet by keeping it from getting out of the Chesapeake Bay. A combination of our soldiers and French soldiers laid siege to Cornwallis’s forces there, who eventually surrendered. I came back two days later to tour the actual battlefields, where the earthen berms created by our forces still exist.

With just three full days and many family obligations, plus the long commutes to and from our house, touring was limited. But we did manage a tour of the Norfolk shipyards, which documents the huge size of the U.S. Navy. The area though is rife with other government institutions, including Army and Air Force bases, and a NASA research facility at Langley Air Force Base where my sister leads a team of spaceflight researchers. We also took in the Virginia Air and Space Science Center, and was given a guided tour by my brother in law. He has excellent credentials as he used to be the manager for the International Space Station.

So it was a great albeit somewhat short reunion, made longer by the hour-plus hour drives each way from our home in Massachusetts and the usual traffic woes between them. A “bomb cyclone” that hit New England even affected us as its winds whipped up the waters, making for a loud night of gale force winds locally that kept us from getting much sleep.

The Hampton Roads area though is worth more extended visits. It’s one of these areas of the country that should be visited much more than it is and would be quite an interesting and exciting area to live.