I wonder if our ancestors were hot...

... I doubt it somehow though.

We spent the next day at Jamestown Settlement finding out lots of stuff about the founding of America. I wish we had had the time to go to Colonial Williamsburg, but alas we didn't. So this was the next best thing. Mind you we arrived at about 3pm so only had two hours to look around and it was enough. It's pretty small.

We saw a musket being fired (although it didn't work so well the second time, oops), went on board some boats and met lots of people dressed in period costume, telling us lots about the life of the colonists. I won't bore you with any more historical facts, but here are a couple of things that came up and we wondered about.

1. The people pretending to be settlers should have all had English accents. In 1607 the people who came over on the boats were English. To preserve true authenticity, the staff should have spoken the King's English, not have varying levels of Southern, Midwestern and Bostonian accents. This was disappointing.

2. The original settlement was a bunch of men. There were no women for obvious reasons (in 1607 going to found a new country was considered inherently too dangerous and too exciting for women to partake in). Women arrived a couple of years later to perform their duty as wives to the settlers. Now it makes me wonder, if you were a young lady of high moral standard (apparently they had to be in order to qualify) and you decided to head off to the New World to meet a husband and you arrived and they were all mingers, what would you do!?! I mean obviously being a woman among 20 horn-ridden men who hadn't seen a female in years you wouldn't be short of offers, but how cheated would you feel if none of them were hot!? Ok I am clearly making the assumption that 17th century women cared about this stuff, I imagine there were other criteria they considered more important for a husband, but I wouldn't be too happy if it were me. Although saying that, if you can't find a husband in England and had to be sent off to marry a lone ranger across the pond, perhaps you were past the point of caring much about what your husband was like as long as you got one.

After our outing to Jamestown we drove up to Richmond, VA, where we failed to find the town centre (the only time we got lost during the holiday and that was only because we didn't have a map of Richmond) and just had a quiet evening in the hotel in the suburbs.