One more thing as a follow up to yesterday’s post about our door prizes from yesterday. The LEDs look amazing. We haven’t actually plugged one in as yet so we can’t comment on their functionality but this product is manufactured and distributed by Imtra; they function from 9-30VDC which is great for us and our 24V house bank; and best of all the price: a tower GU4 LED bulb retails at $13.73 and an X-Beam G4 LED at $16.16. Similar bulbs from other manufacturers and sources are in the $30-40 price range. I’m not sure if they have the full range – multiple colours for running lights, multiple lights in each unit for running lights – that sort of thing, but I hope they do soon. You can check out their website at Imtra Marine

Today we took our weekly tourist trip, this time into Jamestowne. You might remember from history that this was the first permanent English settlement in North America, the site of John Smith, Pocahontas and the set of the movie the New World. Again there were two separate sites here, one federal and one state run and both taking it as an excuse to separate you from some money, but also, again, we feel that it is well worth it. I had come here once before back in 2003 or 2004 when I had traveled down to Norfolk on a staff trip from Ottawa but they had done a lot of upgrades to the place in honour of the 400th anniversary of the settlement on 2007. Much of the archaeological dig has been completed and the site reconstructed so that it is way easier to get a picture of what it was like. The photo accompanying this post is of a bronze model of Fort James, the original settlement at this site. Also, when I was down before they had thought that most of the original fort had been on land that had eroded away but now they realize that wasn’t so and had marked out much of the palisade walls and even reconstructed some of them. They had added a large display and interpretative centre directly on top of some of the dig and left large glass panels in the floor so that you could see down into the site. Very clever! They actually had two interpretative buildings of which one was where you paid your entrance fee and was also a theatre where they described the settlement from the points of view of the Indians, the English and the Africans who were brought in as labourers and slaves. Barb managed to charm our way in on our tickets from Yorktown in spite of the fact that we had saved the wrong portion of the ticket to get us into both places. Helps to be female and good looking. The ticket guy wasn’t going to do a thing for me.

On the way out Barb wanted to stop off at something that she had seen on the way in and which had not been there when I had visited on 2004 – a glass works. This was one of the first industries in the new world as the settlement spent some time trying to find something that they could do to export and eventually hit on importing some Dutch glass blowers and got them working on making glass products both for the colony’s use and to sell back in Europe. This was really interesting to watch as they were making drinking pitchers and I was surprised to see how fast the two artisans could turn them out. I think once the glass was heated it took them less than 10 minutes to make one and I imagine that if the product was simpler it probably would have taken even less time.

The other mission was to find the RBC branch in Williamsburg and find out their hours. Looks like when Tony comes on the boat tomorrow to work on the final stages of the engine install we will be heading back there again to do our banking and to visit the state run portion of the site. It is supposed to rain tomorrow but most of the state site is indoors so we should be able to get value for our tickets anyway and it will be a means of getting out of the mechanic’s way.