After 2 full days driving from hot and humid Texas, we arrived in beautiful Virginia to refreshingly cool temperatures!  We had lunch here, overlooking the beautiful and aptly named Blue Ridge Mountains.

With great anticipation, we had only a couple of hours drive left to arrive in Williamsburg.  By 3pm we arrived at this charming motel, only blocks from Colonial Williamsburg. 

The red bridge is reminiscent of the one at the Governor's Palace at Colonial Williamsburg. 

There was even a duck pond, like the one at the Governor's Palace!

When we planned our vacation, the children told me that as much as they wanted to see and experience all the history, they also wanted to do Nature Study. This charming spot proved to be not only a fun place to view nature up close, but it was also "a wonderful scope for the imagination"! Every morning I made sure we got seats in the motel coffeehouse for breakfast near a colonial style window with a scenic spot!  

To our delight, when we came back from getting our CW tickets and eating dinner the first night, dh had to slow down the van in the motel parking lot  to "make way for ducklings"!  Seven of them! We couldn't wait to get out of the van and meet them! They were spread all over the place, so it was difficult to get a family portrait!  LOL

Mama duck was sweet and allowed us to hang out with them.

This is the best family portrait I was able to take.  All of her babies are the brown fluffs in the grass.

 Each morning, before the motel coffee shop was open for breakfast, we were up and ready for the day and did a little nature study.  The second Handbook of Nature Study assignment is to use words.  Although we had our nature journals with us, we never had time to do any drawing.  So we merely practiced being silent and listened to the sounds.

We went to the pond, stood on the dock and looked and listened.  Funny, there were lots of ducks, but none of them hung out at the pond much.  But we did see fish and turtles.   The words to describe what they heard were "twittering, splashing, singing."  Words to describe what they saw were, "TALL trees (In Texas my dh says we have mere shrubs!), fish, turtles, ducks flapping." A word to describe what they felt was "solid dock".    

After a while at the pond, we went to the red bridge to see the ducklings and their mamma.  DS asked if we had any bread, so I went into the hotel and got my hoagie roll that would have been my sandwich for the day.  I decided it would be worth the sacrifice to feed the sweet babies and eat other foods myself for lunch.   Well, they must have enjoyed that hoagie roll, because the next morning, those babies saw me coming and came running to meet me, their little webbed feet flapping on the pavement as they cried, "peep, peep, peep!"  They were so precious!  They couldn't wait for the bread and pecked at my shoes!

They pecked at dh's shoes.

DS worried that they might start pecking at his toes!

After they were fed, we washed our hands and ate our breakfast.  When I left the motel coffeehouse for the motel room, I met the babies at the foot of the bridge, content and snuggled together.  Aren't they cute!?