Tink Tank: Escape from DC!

Finally, after months of being cooped up in our cave (aka basement), we were able to escape to a nearby adventure.

The adventure begins at Petersburg National Battlefield.

For those of you who read the book or watched the movie Cold Mountain, the opening scene of the book/movie is the horror of Petersburg. The Union army had a division of men from the Pennsylvania Mining Company who came up with the great idea to dig a tunnel under enemy lines.

Once deep into enemy territory, they then filled the tunnel with explosives and ka-boom!!! Very clever idea, right? And, it would have been except that once the air had cleared, the blues then proceeded to run right into the crater created from the explosion. Why?! I'm not sure anyone knows to this day, but needless to say, it was pretty easy pickings for the greys once the blues had jumped into a hole with no way out. The other horror of this particular Civil War battlefield is unlike similar battles that were over in days or weeks, this one lasted for months. Nine long months. I think the Park Ranger summed up the feelings of the veterans the best when he pointed out that unlike many of the other civil war battlefields, this one has very few monuments.

None of the veterans wanted to remember this tragedy. None from either side. I know. Sounds like a bleak start to our adventure, but if we don't learn our history, how will we move forward, instead of back?

To continue our historical weekend, we then traveled to Colonial Williamsburg. By this time, it was getting late and we had dinner reservations at our hotel, so we went straight there and checked in. Now, I had done copious research to find just the right place for our first night out in months. I looked at the websites for pretty much every hotel, resort, and B&B in Williamsburg and finally settled on The Wedmore Place, which, conveniently is also a winery. Believe it or not, that is not the reason I chose the place. I chose it because it looks like this:

And the room I chose looks like this:

Enchanting, right? Yeah. I'm pretty sure that room was cursed. The absolute first thing that happened was I caught my brand new, just finished knitting, shrug on this door and ripped a hole in the sleeve.

Shortly thereafter, the SigO whacked me upside the head while pulling his shirt off.

The fire wouldn't catch.

The hot water ran out before the tub was full.

A series of incidents continued through the night, but by far the kicker was early the next morning when the birds began attacking their reflection in the window. We tried everything. Opening the curtains to reduce the reflection. Banging on the window to scare them off. Finally, we took my lipstick and drew giant faces on the window. I'm not sure if that actually did the trick, or if the angle of the sun finally changed enough that they no longer saw their reflection.

Let's just say this was one of those things that's funny in retrospect, but not so much at the crack of dawn on your day off.
Dinner cetainly wasn't cursed, by the way. I had Foie Gras (I know - I'm a horrible, horrible, barbaric person) and the SigO had Lobster ravioli for the appetizer. We both had venison (again with the barbarism - now I'm eating Bambi's Mother!) for our main course and I had Lemon Panne Cotta while the SigO enjoyed a decadent brownie with ice cream.

Saturday in Colonial Williamsburg was a gorgeous day.