Virginia

I’m in Virginia for a USAF conference. The conference was not why the day was cool, mind you. After the conference I rushed to the hotel, changed out of my uniform and thanked God for my phone-embedded GPS mapping. I just drove. I’ve never been to VA—all over the Pacific rim, but never to VA. Being somewhat a history buff this is a good place to just drive.

So I rambled upon some pretty cool history. Yorktown is most famous as the site of the surrender of General Cornwallis to General George Washington in 1781. The Yorktown battlefield is a spacious expanse complete with the redoubts and encampment areas from 230 years ago. You can almost see the battles, hear the conversations between Washington and his men, and smell the gunpowder.





Later, during the 1862 Peninsula Campaign of the American Civil War (1861–1865), Yorktown was captured from the Confederacy and then used as the base for the Union Army of the Potomac under General George B. McClellan. And as the capitol of the Confederacy, more Civil War battles were fought in VA than any other state. I’ll check those out tomorrow. Just up the road are Jamestown and Williamsburg, among the first permanent settlements on the new continent.

And now, some of the newest and most capable military equipment in the world: Naval Station Norfolk and Naval Air Station Oceana are home to the Atlantic fleet of Naval aircraft carriers, destroyers and submarines and half the US Naval Aircraft; Marine Corps Base Quantico is everything “schoolhouse” to the Marine Corps; Langley AFB is home to the 1st Air Force and the F-22 Raptor, and of course, the “5-sided Puzzle Palace” is here (fighter pilots can’t say the word “Pentagon”). There’s a lot here. In fact, this area is the largest concentration of military bases of any metro area in the world.