Shabbos in Norfolk was nice.  The community is small and friendly.  Around noon on Shabbos, Trish and B and I walked some folks home to their house, leaving M in the RV.  When we returned, M told us that a couple of hoodlums tried to steal a bike off the back of the RV with only their hands.  Between the bungees holding the bikes onto the rack and the cable lock, they didn’t get very far.  M banged on the window overlooking the bike rack, and they ran away.

Today I toured the local yeshiva high school as a potential location for M’s upcoming school year.  This part of Norfolk is very nice:

We hitched up the RV and drove north to visit Fort Monroe National Monument, declared to be the 396th NPS site by President Obama in 2011:

We crossed the moat to enter the fort:

The fort, built in response to the War of 1812, and its surrounding land was an active military facility until 2011:

Masonry fort vocabulary:

The museum is built into the casemates of the fort:

Scale models of the ironclads Monitor and Merrimack, whose only encounter occurred here in the waters off Fort Monroe:

After the Civil War, confederate president Jefferson Davis was imprisoned in this casemate.  The flag on display was hung in this cell on that wall, a reminder of his failure to succeed from the Union:

The rest of Davis’ prison cell:

In later years, the fort was repurposed as housing for military officers:

This exhibit shows World War II era gun emplacement ranges for the harbor:

This house within the fort housed first lieutenant and engineer in the U.S. Army, Robert E. Lee, who was stationed here from 1831 to 1834 and tasked with overseeing the construction of the fort:

The kids completed their Junior Ranger workbooks and received their badges, the third wooden badge they’ve received:

We continued on to Yorktown National Battlefield, a unit of Colonial National Historical Park.  Here, Colonial and French forces bombarded trapped British forces in 1781, resulting in a British surrender of over 7,000 British troops and the beginning of treaty negotiations between America and Britain:

Standing in the British fortifications, we looked out towards the Colonial and French positions:

The kids completed their Junior Ranger workbooks and received their badges:

We drove south for several hours, overnighting at the Walmart of Wildwood, North Carolina.  See the trip map for today’s drive and our current location.