Neel will always choose history for his favorite way to spend a day, and we're lucky enough to have lots of options around these parts. His pick for Father's Day was Historic Jamestown, the first permanent English colony in America.

Lucky for me, his pick for lunch was one of my all-time favorite restaurants. I'd thought it was just me who loved the place (we don't get to go very often, and I think I can remember every single time I've eaten here), but no! Neel loves it too!

Everywhere we go, we try to have mussels now.

And we started with the historic tap water and (some of us) moved straight to the champagne cockails. Good call.

It's a great spot, the Blue Talon Bistro, with Julia Child (although that's Jacques Pepin) always playing above the bar, and if you're ever in the historic triangle of Virginia, I suggest you stop in.

We didn't linger because we wanted to get to Jamestown. The drive (called Colonial Parkway) between the center of Colonial Williamsburg and Jamestown only takes between ten and fifteen minutes, but it's so gorgeous, you almost wish it took longer.

I'm going to be really honest here and admit that I'm not real keen on visitor's centers. I get very sleepy in them every.single.time. Most musesums too. I'm okay in art galleries though. Weird. So I yawned while Neel and Callum wandered around the visitors center (and really, Cal wanted to mostly wander around the gift shop), but pretty soon I was able to encourage them outside to the good stuff. You cross a bridge over a marsh to get to the settlement, and wildlife come to greet you.

Once there, the past comes up to greet you.

The church, whose tower you see here, was built in 1639 (that's old for us, folks!), but the foundation of the original church, which dates back to 1617, can be seen under glass below the floor.

The site is still an active dig, and they've uncovered portions of the original fort as well as graves of some of the first inhabitants (including a fourteen-year old boy).

Jamestown, it was a British colony, you know!

And even here, at the first breath of America, other bits of our history creep in.

If I had just landed in America, I would probably want a view like this too.

This is the original road that went around the Jamestown settlement. We followed it down to some more ruins.

When I was a girl, I used to rake the leaves in our backyard into "leaf houses," laying them out like floorplans. That's what these ruins remind me of.

I could look at them for days.

It's symbolic that you cross a bridge to get too and from the settlement. Stepping into and out of time. We took a drive around the island after we left the visitor's center and slipped back into freeway traffic and headed home. And on the way home we watched some jackwagon zip in and out of traffic, tailgaiting one of those big car transporters. And then he totally rearended some poor sap who was probably just driving home from Father's Day like us. I feel bad for the guy who got hit, but for the guy who did the hitting? What a jerk!

Hi, this is Callum. This picture is taken from a dock along the Ashley and Cooper rivers and the bridge feels like the Gateway to Charleston. I came to Charleston with my camera to take pictures for a geometry project I had for school, but using a camera piqued (vocab word!) my interest in photography and made me want to take pictures like my mom. The bridge has triangles and they were the first of many triangles I saw in the city I named the Triangle City.

The photograph on the left is of our beautiful hotel, the Mills House, and the picture on the right is of one of the many beautiful houses in Charleston.

This is our lovely but quite skittish horse Jasper who gave us a wonderful carriage tour of Charleston. We saw lots of beautiful Victorian homes and century-old churches. The only sad part about the tour was that my mom dropped a tin of lip balm in the middle of the street. We went back to check on it after the tour, but it was crushed (probably by a horse).

For lunch one day we went to the restaurant Slightly North of Broad where we had the gift of sitting by the kitchen where we could see the food being made and the fresh produce.

Because we were on vacation, my mom and dad let me have a wonderful Coke.

For an appetizer we had mussels, and they were SO SO freaking good. This was a good thing because since I wanted to try something new I ordered chicken livers which I didn't like so much. Then my dad gave me his drum fish which was too tough for me so we all nibbled on my mom's beef carpaccio. The other nice part about this restaurant was that this was the real start of my photography adventures in Charleston. After that I was literally addicted to taking picutres.

This was the restaurant where we had dinner. I had rockfish. The best part was the duck fat fries. It was a good thing the food was so good because we walked a two thousand nine hundred million miles to get there.

On our tedious (vocab word!) walk back from Lana, we were pleased by the site of this cool fire station. Here's the engine.

This is the boat that we took to go to the famous Fort Sumter where the Civil War started.

This was our first close up of the fort.

Nearing the end of our visit at Fort Sumter, we were suddenly bombarded! We had to run back onto the boat for shelter.

On our last morning in Charleston, we finally went to a bakery that I'd seen at the beginning of our trip and had wanted to go to the whole time! This is an image I took of the outside of the bakery.

The picture on the left are the baguettes you saw from the outside picture. On the right you have an image of my delectable (vocab word!) cream cheese bagle that I got for breakfast that morning. As I said before this was our last day and the end of the beginning of my first chapter in photography.

history man {life}

callum sees city life {life}