I just got home from a great trip to Virginia. I think it was the 40th annual bike trip with a group of amazing friends who have covered the country through the years.  If you haven’t traveled by bike, consider it. There’s no better way to get a deep feel of where you are. For example, riding the Colonial Parkway to Jamestown, we passed a barn decorated with more crosses than a cathedral. It was a small dairy operation and the group all stopped to take pictures with the holy cows, in this case, Holy-steins. I doubt we would have noticed that driving past in a car. We went to Monticello, home of Thomas Jefferson. I had been there maybe 25 years ago, and the tour this year was quite different. For example, somewhere in the last 25 years, they discovered that there were Black people there. That wasn’t mentioned years ago.  Now, there was a pretty intensive discussion about Jefferson’s relationship with Sally Hemings, who was a slave on his property and mother of several of his children, who he never acknowledged. It got stranger. Hemings was the half-sister of Jefferson’s late wife, because Jefferson’s father-in-law also fathered children with his slaves. It is impossible to reconcile “all men are created equal” with any of that. As the tour guide explained these complex relationships, most of the people in the room were extremely puzzled, unable to put this weird family tree together. Our group, mostly with deep Utah roots, had no problems at all. Compared to some or our complicated family trees, having children with your wife’s half-sister was pretty straightforward.We saw Jamestown, the real one, where the Park Service recently discovered that centuries of exploration of the early settlement were in the wrong place. They had a full blown archeological dig there, and a lab to process the artifacts. It was interesting to see how they sifted through layers of soil.  In the lab, a woman was sorting through about a cubic yard of skeletal bits recovered from a trash pit. She was sorting the crab parts from fish bones with tweezers. The goal was to figure out what they were eating. The colony ran out of food and resorted to eating horses and dogs, and they were trying fix the approximate dates, and also, how important crabs were in their diet. This was happening as the annual congressional budget government shutdown crisis was looming. After watching her sort the crab parts for a while, the consensus among a politically diverse group was that maybe a shutdown would be OK.At the Yorktown battlefield, where Cornwallis surrendered to George Washington in the decisive battle of the Revolutionary War, the woods were so deep I couldn’t imagine a cannonball would penetrate more than a few feet. There were signs saying that this was Washington’s headquarters, with 2,000 troops camped there. I don’t think 20 men could find a space to stand up in that thicket, let alone camp out in the depicted rows of tents and parade grounds. Other equally jungle-like places were where they fired cannons at the ships in the bay, which couldn’t be seen through the woods. Finally, at the very end of the loop I came across a sign that said that in the 1770s, all of this would have been cleared and cultivated farm land instead of forest. Suddenly it made sense.Another helpful sign said, “This sign has been removed for repairs.” It was right there, claiming not to be. The South is full of enigmas.The museum at Yorktown is amazing, the kind of place you could spend a couple of days learning about the Revolutionary War and the Civil War, which both mowed through there.  They had an exhibit outside depicting how the typical American farmer would have lived in 1770. Colonial Williamsburg was clearly depicting how the wealthy lived. The subsistence farmers’ houses long ago rotted away. It was a nice cabin of milled logs, with a separate kitchen so the heat was not inside in the summer. It might be comfortable. It was almost exactly like my mother’s childhood home in Idaho 150 or so years later.Nobody could explain why Plymouth and the Pilgrims (1620) get all the acclaim for being the first, and Jamestown, which really was first by 13 years, is usually a footnote in our high school history books.  The Virginians took umbrage at that, but other than it being more Yankee aggression, had no answer. I found a National Park Service article on that topic online. Their explanation was that Jamestown was settled by only men motivated by conquest and money. Plymouth was settled by families motivated by a pious and altruistic version of conquest and money.  Not buying that. The Pilgrims obviously had a better PR agent.Flying home, I was able to take off before Hurricane Helene arrived, and it mostly skipped Richmond anyway. But we flew through/over it on the bumpiest commercial flight I’ve ever experienced. The flight crew said to sit down, buckle up, and keep the barf bag handy.      I arrived home just in time for a forest fire to erupt a couple of miles from my house. It quickly went from “no big deal” to “you might want to keep a bag of necessities in the car” overnight. So far, it’s moving away from my place, but yikes.Tom Clyde practiced law in Park City for many years. He lives on a working ranch in Woodland and has been writing this column since 1986.The post More Dogs on Main: Biking the Revolutionary War appeared first on Park Record.