Yorktown / Washington Birthplace

Jamestown, VA to Annapolis, MD | Visiting Yorktown Battlefield | Visiting George Washington Birthplace National Monument | August 2025

We rose early after our night camping next to the Jamestown Settlement, and got a head start on our morning drive. Since the Colonial Parkway was closed, we decided to make the most of our drive and get Poquoson County, which is quite out of the way and like many Virginia city-counties, we wondered how it got to be its own county. What’s important is that we got it, and now we have no reason to return to the greater Norfolk area.

When we arrived at Yorktown Battlefield, our first stop of the day, there was a little time before it opened, so we started our visit by walking to the Yorktown Victory Monument. When the visitor center opened, we toured the museum and watched the short film. While we could have toured the site of the Redoubts or taken a long driving tour, we opted to just go for a long walk around the historic downtown area. It was early enough that the town was quiet, and we ended up making a big loop down by the water before making our way back up to the visitor center. As the morning progressed, it became more obvious that it was in fact a holiday weekend as more and more people came out to enjoy the warm day and the surf along the water…so naturally we decided to push on.

Next, we had a long drive to make from here into Maryland — made longer by us trying to be as efficient as possible in entering counties. We got a lot of new ones as we weaved up and down around the different peninsulas along the Chesapeake, and overall it was a scenic drive with not a lot of traffic, considering it was a holiday weekend. After a few hours of driving, we made it to our next historic site, George Washington Birthplace National Monument.

True to its name, this is the site of Washington’s Birthplace. But because it wasn’t preserved until the 19th century, the history after the history is slightly more interesting. There’s a full home reconstruction built in the 1930’s based on…what they thought things looked like? It was definitely interesting, and a lot of the exhibits were more about how the Monument came to be rather than the actual site. This makes sense since Washington only lived here a short portion of his life, there’s not a lot of written documentation about the place, and everything was destroyed during the Revolutionary War. We had a nice talk with the Rangers. They recently finished an archaeological dig, so hopefully the exhibits will have a bit more insight in the near future. We also saw an exhibit asking for volunteers to help the National Archives and the National Parks Service to transcribe old Revolutionary War pension records, naturally we signed up.

Once we were finished, we got back on the road and made our way to Dahlgren. As we drove through, we reminisced on the time we came here for work back in 2021, pointing out the hotel where we stayed and the restaurants we visited. We crossed the bridge into Maryland, and continued on our planned route which helped us get almost all counties on the West side of the Chesapeake.

Places to boondock in this area were few and far between, but we found a couple of options in Annapolis that looked promising. We started by driving to a park that was a little out of the way and didn’t have any ‘no overnight parking’ signs, so we decided to hang out here at least until dark to see if we felt comfortable. It was off a quieter road and not busy, and we eventually decided we felt alright sleeping here. It was nice to have a park to walk around until the sun went down, and then we turned in to the van for the night, where we stayed up late transcribing old documents for the National Park service.