Happy Belated New Year!

Greetings all,

My apologies for the lateness of this post. Don’t really have a reason…

It’s been a year of settling into our new lives here in Williamsburg. Discovery, learning, adventure. It’s definitely been a slower pace. Truth be told, we’ve gotten very comfortable with it.

Willliamsburg is an interesting city. In actuality, it’s a fairly small community, with the James City County population being some 80k in the last census. I suspect it’s increased since then, but definitely not by a large percentage.

The one thing that Williamsburg is, is a tourist community. Between Colonial Williamsburg (CW), and Busch Gardens, the city/county population enlarges significantly during the summer months. This is a blessing and a curse.

In the non-tourist season, it’s easy to get in restaurants and such, but many of them have reduced hours in the off season. The curse is the restaurants tend to be pricey, with food that oftentimes is not commensurate with the pricing. With a tourist economy, there is always another customer.

Saying all that, we have found a few gems. It’s definitely a learning process.

We’ve made it a point to start visiting some of the tourist attractions this year, but we’ve definitely only scratched the surface. We bought “Good Neighbor” passes from CW, but have only used them to visit the museums. In their latest e-mail, CW has significantly reduced the entrance fees to the facility, and made access to the museum open to the public free of charge. I’ve heard that attendance has dropped way off since the COVID epidemic.

Saying all that, here is a brief summary of all the interesting things we’ve done last year, if for no other purpose than for having a place to record it:

Starting the year,in January we travelled to Charlotte, NC with Tim and Terry to see Cirque du Soleil. This was interesting as there was an “IchibonCon” at the Embassy Suites ongoing at the same time. Parking was a bit of a fiasco, but the sights and sounds were quite memorable.
In February on a sorta lost drive around the area, we discovered the Wharf Hill Brewing Company in Smithfield, VA. This place is a real treat. Good food, great ambiance, reasonable pricing. We’ve been back couple of times since then.
Later in February, we visited the American Revolution Museum in Yorktown, with Tim and Terry. Most of the attractions in the area provide free admission for locals. This is a nice exhibit, but truth be told, most of it is not historical artifacts. There are a few bits and bobs intermixed with a lot of displays with stuff to read. Interesting nonetheless.
In February, we got a wild hair and bought sofas for the house. We had looked all around and finally selected a sofa love seat pair from Ashley Furniture down in Newport News. They were a LOT more money than I wanted to spend, but so be it.
In March, we packed up the car and took a trip down to Baton Rouge. It was a 3 day trip down and back. We stayed in Greensville, SC and Tuscaloosa, AL on the way down. Due to hotel issues on the way back, we stayed in Birmingham, AL and Greensville, SC. For a plethora of reasons, we won’t be driving through Birmingham in the future if we can avoid it.
In May, we went to the Virginia Renaissance Fair with Tim and Terry. If I’m honest, I don’t think they enjoyed it that much. Not their thing I guess….
On the last day of May we got a wild hair and decided to drive to Chincoteague, VA. Unfortunately, we decided to do this without any research whatsoever. It’s a long drive, some 3 hours, as we had to drive down to Virginia Beach and then take the tunnel/bridge to the Eastern Shore of Virginia. We got all the way to Tom’s Cove Park and then turned around, not knowing that if we had only crossed the next bridge, we would have actually been able to get to the beach. Doh!
For Father’s Day, Jourdan and Stefani came to town, and we went to Agecroft Hall in Richmond, VA. It’s an interesting place with a fascinating history. We had a great time.
Later in June, we visited The Jamestown Settlement with Tim and Terry.
The next day we visited the Colonial Folk Art Museum.
In June, Melanie and I attended the Greek Fest at St. Demetrios Greek Orthodox Church on Mooretown Road. It was fairly crowded, but it definitely was not the best Greek food we ever had. Cet ‘la vie.
In July, Melanie and I took a trip out to Northern Neck. It was a nice drive. We had been out there once before, but was nice revisiting. It’s a beautiful area, but is very remote.
In July, we took a trip up to Springfield to have lunch with Meghan for her 40th birthday. I also needed to get an inspection for Scarlett, so it was a dual use trip!
From there, we traveled to Hillsboro to stay with Tim and Terry. They had bought tickets to the Hillsboro Wine and Food Festival. We spent the weekend and returned to Williamsburg.
In August, after Debby made her way through Virginia, we traveled back to Hillsboro to attend the showing of “The Murder on the British Express” at the Creeks Edge Winery in Lovettesville, VA. It was a good show, and the food was very good. We had a great time.
In early September, I went into Williamsburg to attend the Colony Auto Enthusiast Auto Show. I had gotten spoiled by the plethora of car shows in Fairfax, so when I saw this one, I immediately decided to attend. I had even asked for a spot to present Scarlett, but I was rather dryly told that the car really didn’t fit the “requirements” for the show. In any event, I attended. I was a bit late getting there, and it was the 2nd Sunday of the Month meaning the crowds were thicker than usual.
On September 27th, we took a trip to Doswell, VA to attend the Virginia State Fair with Tim and Terry. I hadn’t been to a State Fair since I was a child, so this was something new-ish. Unfortunately a weather system came through at the same time making it a complete washout. All of the animal husbandry exhibits were cancelled. So we walked around a bit and then returned to Williamsburg to some excellent homemade pizza.
In October, we travelled down to Durham to Jourdan and Stefani’s house. The next day, we drove to Charlotte to attend the North Carolina Renaissance Festival. We had done this last year and had enjoyed the trip. It was much earlier in the season last year, and thus much warmer. This was the last weekend of the fest and the weather was perfect. Unfortunately, that meant it was very crowded. Evidently it was completely sold out which I would believe as there were a lot of people in attendance. We like Ren Fair’s but so do a lot of other folks.
Terry and Tim came back to Williamsburg late in the month and we visited Bacon’s Castle in Surry and then drove down to Smithfield where we attended the “Halloween Hotel Horror” presented by the All Y’all Players at the Wharf Hill Brewery. It was a great time, but we didn’t get home until midnight. Long day…
Not to be deterred, the next day we traveled down to Norfolk and did the Victory Rover Naval Base Cruise. It was a great cruise, albeit a wee bit chilly. We did get to briefly tour the USS Wisconsin, and that was a treat. I had worked on a sister ship, the USS Iowa many years ago when I worked at Avondale Shipyard.
In November was the big trip to Falling Water and then Niagara Falls. Originally intended to travel with Tim and Terry, they had to wave off due to impending birth of a Grand Child, we departed on November 6, and returned home on November 12th. It was a great trip. Details will be provided in a future blog entry.
To wrap up the years’ excitement, we traveled back down to Durham to attend Cirque du Soleil Spirit of Christmas at the Durham Performing Arts Center (DPAC). We we’re to stay the weekend, but Jourdan was afflicted with the crud, so we decided it was best to depart the next day.

And that’s most of the excitement for the year. Most of these adventures will be mentioned in future entries, with photos of course. Stay tuned!

I would be remiss by not mentioning how much easier this process would have been had Google not decided to deprecate Google Maps Timeline on the desktop. Evidently in response to GDRP in the EU, it was decided to force users to migrate their timeline data to their individual devices. Once this was done, all the timeline data available on the desktop was deleted. The interwebs are replete of stories of people losing years of timeline data. Somehow, I managed to get mine saved to my tablet. It’s unclear how I did that. Jourdan was able to copy the data from my tablet to my phone as that’s where all my location data is going to come from.

The desktop Google Maps Timeline was far easier to use and significantly more useful than on my phone. Thanks guys…..

There’s been a plethora of technical stuff that happened in the house in 2024, but this has gotten long enough, so I’ll talk about those later.

So, to wrap this up, let’s get to:

Resolutions:

Unfortunately, this is gonna look a lot like New Years past. As a matter of fact, I copied and pasted last years post, and updated…..

Post weekly to the blog.
No profanity – I used to work in an office full of ex-Sailors who had salty vocabularies. Unfortunately this rubbed off. Don’t have that excuse any longer.
Drop the 15+ pounds or so I’ve picked up since retiring. The clothes are getting tight.
Reinvigorate the photography – 2024 was a “fairly” good year, but it paled in reference to previous years. I did do the “Single in November” series on Cameraderie. This is a series where you post one photo taken each day with a specific camera and lens. In a fit of insanity, I chose the Fuji X-Pro2, with the XF35mm f1.4. An additional wrinkle was added that my entries would be only in Black and White, and they would only be Straight Out Of Camera (SOOT). I knew that our trip to Falling Water/Niagara was upcoming, and didn’t want to drag a laptop with me to post process the images. So it was all done from my Samsung Galaxy Tab S4. It was an interesting experiment.
Get back on the fitness course – This has been a real challenge. My back issues have reoccured and are no longer effectively kept in check via my Yoga routines. As such, I can only stand for short periods of time before developing spasms throughout. This has stopped any efforts at my usual walks, but hasn’t prohibited me from riding the ellipical. So, for the short term, that’s the goal.
Home Assistant – I’ve got about a dozen automations set up at this stage. The major task remaining is to develop the interface for Melanie to use distributing music around the house. All the equipment is here, just waiting on me. The programming interface in HA, Yet Another Markup Language (YAML), completely baffles me. It’s been a challenge.

Until next time: