Sarah Creek and Yorktown VA USA

Sarah Creek after the rain finally stopped

Having got ourselves into Sarah Creek on Friday, our plan had been to dig out our bikes on Saturday and cross over to the other side of York River to visit Yorktown.  It was a great plan, except that it just rained solidly for most of day.

Sarah Creek in the evening light

Sightseeing was put on hold for the day and we hid down below with the heater running.  We should have started tackling the backlog of blog entries for our time in New York but instead we both turned into bookworms.  Despite the rain outside we both had a great time drinking gallons of tea and munching chocolate chip cookies whilst we worked our way through a couple of easy reads.  When the rain finally stopped in the late afternoon I took the pictures above. With the now clear skies and the mirror-like water it was hard to believe that it had been grey and overcast with rain and drizzle for the previous 10 hours.

Our bikes in their stowage under the forepeak bunk

Sunday 28^thOctober was a much more promising day for venturing out so after breakfast we pulled apart the forepeak so that we could dig out our folding bikes from their stowage under our bunk.  We also had to inflate the dinghy so all in all getting ready for our run ashore was a bit more of a faff than normal.

Blue Velvet under a very blue sky

The George P Coleman Memorial Bridge across the York River

We left BV at anchor under a beautiful blue sky and headed our heavily laden dinghy towards the nearby marina where we could get ashore.  A quick check with the staff confirmed that we could leave the dinghy there and so we proceeded to set up the bikes and head off towards Yorktown.  That took us up and over the toll bridge which fortunately had a wide service road (hard shoulder) we could cycle on to keep us clear of the thundering traffic.  Once over the other side we freewheeled round a slip road which brought us back down to sea level and historic Yorktown.

Historic Yorktown, parts of which are hugely reminiscent of rural Hampshire (England!)….

York County is one of the eight original shires formed in colonial Virginia in 1682.  The controlling town, Yorktown, was founded a year earlier as a port through which the English colonists could export tobacco to Europe.

…..but with less traffic

The trade in tobacco brought great wealth and the town reached the height of its development in the mid 1700s when it had 250-300 buildings and a population of around 2000 people.  That wealth was evident in the number of brick buildings and for us the architectural style was just like the village we’d lived in in Hampshire back in the UK.  Nine buildings in Yorktown still survive from the pre-Revolutionary era.

The Yorktown Victory Monument (finished in 1884) commemorates the victory, the critical alliance with France that helped them win, and the subsequent peace with Great Britain after the
American Revolutionary War (1775-1783)

The same waterway transport links that made the town an ideal port to support the tobacco plantations also made the town a strategic location during both the Revolutionary War and the later American Civil War (1861-1865).  Troops positioned here controlled the access to upstream portions of the York River as well as access to the Chesapeake Bay.

The town is most famous as the site of the siege and subsequent surrender of the British Commander, General Charles Cornwallis, to General George Washington and the French Fleet during the American Revolutionary War on 19 October 1781.  The British defeat at Yorktown effectively ended the war and the rather grand Yorktown Victory Monument highlights the significance of the town in American history.  To find out more about the decisive Franco-American victory and what happened in the Siege of Yorktown we had to cycle a little further to the site of the battlefield.

Sarah Creek and Yorktown, Virginia, USA