Fireworks at Colonial Williamsburg, July 4th, 2009

Colonial Williamsburg did a great job this year coordinating their evening show.  The evening started off with a one hour show performed by the Fife and Drum junior corp followed by the senior corp.  At the end of the show, the fireworks began.  The show lasted the typical 15 minutes and then the grand finale.  But wait, Colonial Williamsburg had a surprise for us all.  A second grand finale followed but yet a 3rd grand finale that had a false end and continued.  A very well planned out evening.  At the end of the final grand finale the Fife and Drums once again performed a few more sets while marching down the Duke of Gloucester street.  Traffic was a nightmare getting out of the area.  Though this is normal and expected.  Going a simple mile takes about 20 minutes and there are no short cuts as everyone else is thinking the same thing.

Heard throughout the area the enitre day was a Christian rock Band that was performing at a local school grounds.  They could be heard up until about 7:00 PM.  Though they did not pack in the crowds, they had a good following and a nice sound.

Colonial Williamsburg Fife and Drum Junior Corp Playing Yankee Doodle

The Colonial Williamsburg Fife and Drum junior corp started out the 4th of July evening show with a tribute to the 13 colonies.  Here we have a clip of the opening of the show.  We are working on bringing you the entire show as fast as we can process it.  The show was about 1 hour long.

Belle Mount Vineyards Rep Says Northern Neck Wineries Not Worth Our Time

While we were attending the very boring wine festival in Kilmarnock Virginia, we spoke with a representative from Belle Mount Vineyards who did a great job of convincing us that the wineries in the Northern Neck are not worth our time. We believe him in regards to Belle Mount then. We are seeking to build an on line driving tour of wineries starting at the Williamsburg winery and finishing up at Oak Crest. This representative also told us that he was pretty confident that he was speaking for the other wineries as well in the Northern Neck. Well, we will contact all of them separately and let them tell us if they would like to be included in the tour.

Looks like Belle Mount Vineyards will not be on the list though. Our plan is to visit each winery, take our own pictures, create our own review web sites of each winery, link each winery then to a master site that will be the driving tour and also each review site will link the official web site of each winery with it. The wine tour we are looking to create is much different than anything else out in the marketplace today. We will have highlights of each winery, hours of operation, special features, some history of each winery, mileage between each winery, overall mileage from starting point to ending point if you visit all the wineries, and the time it will take to complete the tour. Which wineries are musts if you are limited on time, and custom maps that you can print out or link your GPS to.

What makes us different? We are not part of some kind of consortium, a government agency or paid company designed to put a spin on any of the vineyards. We do not have advertisers and we are not being paid to put this together for anyone. Everything we do comes out of our own pockets. So if we lost a potential friend in Belle Mount Vineyards, we really don’t care. We cover history, events, arts, culture and the art of living. So a winery driving tour is within our scope of interest. If in the event some of the other wineries feel the same as Belle Mount Vineyards, then we will scrap the tour and then cover the ones that are interested. There is no cost to any of the wineries so why not take advantage of it?

Kilmarnock Wine Festival, A Real Snooze

We decided to go to the Kilmarnock Wine Festival today. If you missed this event, no you didn’t. It was not even worth us getting out of the car. We had planned on taking pictures but with so few vendors and so few people, it wasn’t worth the battery power. If you are a wine lover like us, there was nothing there worth your time. As much as we would like to bring you a nice story, it just wasn’t there.

Kalmar Nyckel Sailing Into The Dock At Yorktown

The Kalmar Nyckel is seen here in this video sailing into dock in Yorkown this past weekend, June 14th, 2009.  The Kalmar Nyckel has been in the area since the Blackbeard Festival in Hampton, June 5th through the 7th, 2009.  The tall ship was only in Yorktown for the weekend taking paid customers out on 3 hour cruises.  She can be seen one more time in the South Eastern section of Virginia at the Harbor Fest in Norfolk Virginia.  The dates for that are July 3rd through the 5th this year.

We highly recommend taking the time to make the trip.  You won’t be disappointed.  To visit and learn more about the Kalmar Nyckel and The Kalmar Nyckel foundation, please visit them by CLICKING HERE.

Ceol Leinn Gave An Outstanding Performance Throughout The Weekend At The Hampton Blackbeard Festival

Ceol Leinn, pronounced (Key-Ole Lane-ya), gave outstanding performances throughout the entire weekend at the Hampton Blackbeard Festival June 6th and 7th, 2009.  They not only performed on one stage, they would take a break at the one stage and then proceed to the next stage in another section of the 3 block radious and give yet another performance.  The amount of energy and effort put out by the entertainers was nothing short of amazing when you look at everything they went through to entertain all the guests at the event.

With a head count of 75,000 visitors at the festival, this group was a major hit and one of the highlights of the festival for us.  The video above was shot at dusk which is why it appears so dark.  To learn more about Ceol Leinn, please CLICK HERE.

Blooper At The Hampton Blackbeard Festival

Here we captured a blooper during the Hampton Blackbeard Festival.  The English soldiers were firing on Blackbeard and his crew as they stole a ship that was in the harbor.  Pretty funny.