America's first bachelor community

If you get tired of touring all the historic buildings in Colonial Williamsburg, you can go on over to neighboring Jamestown, which, even though it was actually the first permanent English settlement here, is not as famous as Plymouth, mainly because the settlers at Jamestown did not have the foresight to think up Thanksgiving.

But at Jamestown you can, in an astonishingly short amount of time, tire of looking at museum artifacts and reading signs that explain, based on exhaustive expert research, what they are ("This appears to be a man's belt, although it could also be the jawbone of a giant whale"). When we were there, there was an exhibit on the drawings of John White, whose detailed pictures showed the abundant animals and food in the new land, including crabs, box turtles, and McDonald's Filet-o-Fish. These drawings caused a stir back in England, where people wanted to know why they only had Hardee's.

The museum does attempt to enhance your visit by posing questions. For example, why is it that when you watch the orientation movie in these places and the theater is half empty, the tallest person in the room is always sitting right in front of you? Unfortunately the museum had no answer for that question. Another sign urged visitors to look for the exhibit showing leftover food items from 400 years ago and identify them. "No problem," Joe said. "I used to be a bachelor. I'll know what they are."

In fact, Jamestown was at first made up completely of bachelors. This explains why the original site has only recently been uncovered. You know that if women had been around, they would have left a detailed map to where everything was, along with a note to remember to take out the garbage.

We saw a lot of other evidence that Jamestown was a bachelor hangout. Above the fireplace in one building, the jugs and crocks were stacked only one deep on the shelf. If women had been in charge, they would have stacked things at least ten deep, rendering the men useless at finding any of them.

In the re-created Jamestown settlement was an outdoor clay oven. We asked a lot of questions about that, mainly, would a group made up entirely of men and boys know what to do with it? The male costumed interpreter -- who sat on a comfortable rock out of heat range, talking to visitors while the female interpreter did all the work related to the oven -- seemed miffed at this question. "Of course," he said. "These were English gentlemen here. It was quite fashionable in England at the time for gentlemen to collect and exchange recipes. It was something of a hobby for them."

I turned to Joe. "That would be a good hobby for you to take up, honey," I said.

But Joe was more impressed with the cooking facilities in the Indian Village. We were told that they would scoop out a hole in the ground, put a pot of food in it, and surround it with hot coals. "The first Crock Pot," the guide said. "It would stay hot all day, and the Indians would just help themselves when they were hungry. A teenage boy's dream."

It was also Joe's dream. "Wouldn't that be great to have a Crock Pot going all day and you could just eat whenever you wanted?" he said excitedly. "You wouldn't have to stop and make something!" My thought about the Crock Pot set-up was, how do they know that's what it was used for? For all we know, it could have been the world's first heated toilet. Now that would have been something useful.

Of course women eventually came to Jamestown. Someone had to do the laundry and make sure the men were wearing clean underwear, although the men didn't see what the big deal was, since the Indians didn't wear any underwear, and you didn't see their wives making a fuss about it.

After hearing about droves of women braving the ocean in a teeny tiny little ship for months, Joe immediately wanted to know how many bathrooms were on the ship. But he thought maybe the women had a sailing advantage, because they could have used their hair dryers to power the sails.

Jamestown went on to prosper and even became the capital of Virginia, until in 1699 leaders decided they needed a capital that was more hip and in step with the times -- Jamestown was SO early 17th century -- and founded Las Vegas. Jamestown went into a slow decline, although it enjoyed a brief resurgence in popularity when Martha Stewart visited in order to study early Crock Pot design. Today thousands of tourists visit this important site to ponder our earliest history and walk where our forefathers walked. Hopefully, they are all wearing clean underwear.