Today we drove down the lumpy paving of I-64 to Newport News, VA, to visit the Mariner’s Museum, a maritime museum with a bunch of great exhibits. We initially paid them $14 a head to get in and wandered into a large section of the museum that dealt exclusively with the USS Monitor and the CSS Virginia which most folks call the Merrimack. The USS Merrimack was salvaged by the Confederates after the shipyard at Newport News was burned by retreating Union forces at the beginning of the Civil War. The partially destroyed Merrimack was re-outfitted as the ironclad CSS Virginia and was shortly thereafter involved in the first battle of ironclads which ended in a decisive draw.
The Virginia / Monitor exhibit is extensive and we were beginning to think that the museum should be called the Monitor / Virginia place when we arrived back in the lobby and found out we had only seen a little fraction of the facility. The place also has a great variety of sailing ship bowsprit art, model ships, a small craft museum with real boats, a section on submarines, cannons, mortars, reconstructions of parts of sailing vessels, lots of biographical material about seagoing types, maritime instruments for timekeeping and navigation, a life-size reconstruction of the USS Monitor, reconstructions of the Monitor’s turret and the actual turret that they recovered off Hampton Roads, VA, which is still in an enormous conservation water tank until it quits exuding salt.
After wandering about in the museum until our feet bellowed for relief, we departed and drove to Yorktown. At this location you can see all the old earthworks for the protection of guns and soldiers for both the British and the U.S. sides in the Battle of Yorktown. Yorktown was where George Washington and the Continental Army surrounded the British and their commander, Cornwallis. Once surrounded by artillery, even the Brits knew they were screwed since there were Continental guns on most sides of their garrison and the York River at their backs. It did not take long for them to bail out, having the British Navy pick them up and take them back to the U.K. We won and they lost. It is probably fortunate that we won here since the Continental Army was much harried during the war and had Cornwallis not gathered all his forces here to be driven into the sea and the war continued, the result could have been quite different. If it had been different, we might still be eating crummy food and driving on the wrong side of the road.
We decided to splurge on a meal in a seafood restaurant on the way home but, as usual, the place we selected to eat was closed so we went back to the Invader and had good food.