Williamsburg vacation

Living in the South-East growing up, both JP and I went to Williamsburg at some point or another for history class and I'd pretty much not given it much thought beyond that.  But then for our first Valentine's day while in law school JP surprised me with a trip up there and it sort-of became our new tradition.  It's amazing how easy it is to slip away from the real world when you're there -- to take the time to stroll around outside and take pictures of cows and talk about what life would have been like then or share stories or convict a fictional woman of being a witch (for the record, JP and I voted not guilty and had an absurdly in depth conversation afterward about the evidentiary burdens of such things -- you can take the girl out of the law but not the law out of the girl apparently).

We've stayed somewhere different each year and this time we stayed at a tavern right on the main street.  Tiny room but nothing beats stepping outside and seeing a gang of fife and drum players going by. It just feels like stepping into another world, especially when it's the dead of winter and there's hardly anyone else around so the place feels like it belongs only to the ghosts and us.

We did a bunch of walking around, drove the Yorktown and Jamestown loops enjoying a sunny sky and spent the obligatory afternoon at the Williamsburg Winery (where JP proposed to me two years ago).  We ate lots and LOTS of yummy food :)

We also played this game called Once Upon a Time which was awesome!  Basically, there are two decks of cards: one with endings and one with people, places, descriptions, etc.  You deal an ending to each player and then a mish-mash of the other cards and the object of the game is to tell a story using your cards to get to that ending (and you can interrupt other players at certain times).  Winner is the first to play all cards.

We set a fire in the tavern common room and turned down the lights and opened a bottle of wine and jiggered the rules a bit -- basically we had one common ending ("And for all I know they may be dancing still") and we chose cards from our hands and passed them to the other player and they had to use that card to continue the story.  It ended up being really amazing -- probably took a couple of hours to tell this story that we got totally wrapped up in.  One of the best nights ever!

Sometimes it's nice to step into another world to get away from it all :)

Today I'm in Baltimore hanging with the fab Diana Peterfreund before The Dead-Tossed Waves comes out tomorrow and the official tour starts.  SQUEE!  Oh!!