Saturday in Yorktown Battlefield

Saturday we enjoyed Belgian waffles for breakfast and went down the Colonial Parkway out to Yorktown. We drove by a re-enactment of a Civil War camp, (special just for this weekend). We checked in at the Visitor Center and watched a short film, "The Seige of Yorktown". Then we went on a self-guided, 7 mile driving tour along American and French seige lines. We saw the Moore house - site of the surrender negotiations ending the seige, and Surrender Field. They had original and reproduced cannons, and various other weapons, and redoubts to check out. All the lands are still as open and untouched. You could really get a feel for how it was so long ago. I must admit, Jason got more out of it than me, but it was very moving to be standing where these mere 25,000 men changed history forever on this, of all weekends - Memorial Day weekend.



At about 3pm, I was done drinking in history and pried Jason from Yorktown. It was time to head to the Outlets! We did just that and man, was it crowded! We walked all around, stopping in the kitchen store to pick up a new popcorn maker and cute bowls. After about an hour, we walked back to the car, noting what we kept mentioning to each other, Darn, everyone and their uncle has vanity plates here!! Just walking to our car, we saw these in the row:







When we got home, Jason found this on the internet:

In 2007, the American Association of Motor Vehicle Administrators (AAMVA) and Stefan Lonce, author of License to Roam: Vanity License Plates and the Stories They Tell, conducted North America's first state by state and province by province survey of vanity plates, revealing that there are 9.7 million vehicles "vanitized" with personalized vanity license plates.

The survey ranked jurisdictions by "vanity plate penetration rate", which is the percentage of registered motor vehicles that are vanitized.^[1] Virginia has the highest U.S. vanity plate penetration rate (16.19%), followed by New Hampshire (13.99%), Illinois (13.41%), Nevada (12.73%), Montana (9.8%), Maine (9.79%), Connecticut (8.14%), New Jersey(6.88%), North Dakota (6.51%) and Vermont (6.11%). Texas had the lowest vanity plate penetration rate (.56%).

Holy crow!!