4th of July in Yorktown
08 July 2009 | Yorktown, VA
Mike
July 4th... Yorktown, VA
Sometime around midmorning we took the dinghy in to the marina and tied up. The beach was filling fast. There was a portable tower with speakers up high playing music and there were people everywhere. We walked across the street to catch the Trolley out to the Battlefield. The walking tour time had been changed, but there was one still in sight so we caught up and listened to the Ranger talk about what had happened here.
Having taught American History for many years I was well versed with the siege of Yorktown and its importance. However, unlike most of the Battlefields in Virginia, I'd never visited here. It took just a minute to see that I've had some things wrong in my head all these years. The first thing was the orientation of the site. Since Washington and his army had walked down were from New York and the peninsula runs west to east, in my mind I had the battlefield on a west to east orientation. In fact the siege was carried out from a more south to north direction. I also had visualized the road coming into town being straight.... it's not. The last item that surprised me was how close the two lines were to each other. The distance between the two armies was much less than the normal Civil War site.
The ravine where the British command post was dug in now has a bridge, but is about 60 deep with very steep sides covered with bamboo. I was surprised about the bamboo.
We walked the battlefield for a couple of hours and then headed back down the hill to town where things were really hopping. The beach, which runs for about a mile was packed, traffic was almost at a standstill and there were way too many people to watch. Our favorite Pub was over run with bikers, so we wandered down the Riverwalk to another restaurant and were seated right away.
After a nice meal we motored the mile or so back to the boat and spent the remainder of the afternoon watching boats anchor all around us for the fireworks. There was a fly-over at 4pm... and we were planning on heading back to the park for a concert at 5 but decided to listen to it from the boat instead. It was a good plan, but just before 5 an old Egg Harbor with three couples (and kids) anchored next to us and immediately turned on the nearest country western radio station.... at a volume that effectively drowned out both the Fife and Drum Corps of Yorktown and the Air Force Band that played later.
The river here is deep and there's a lot of tidal current, which is why we're paying for a mooring, and it was fun watching little boats come in and attempt anchor. In some cases their anchors never even hit bottom, but most boats just didn't have the anchors or the scope to hold. Fortunately no one was going to be leaving their boat untended.
The fireworks started as the band put a bump note on their last John Phillip Sousa March and were amazing from beginning to end. The finale had about twice as many explosions as the entire show back at Crystal Lake. I have no idea how many folks were in the area watching but it certainly numbered in the hundreds of thousands.